Richard J. Parish, M.A., D.Phil. (B.A. Newc.), Commandeur de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques

Professor of French, Fellow of St Catherine's College.

Richard Parish passed away on 1 January 2022.

Richard Parish has worked on French seventeenth-century theatre (Racine: the limits of tragedy, 1993; editions of Bérénice, Phèdre, Le Tartuffe), comic fiction, and in particular on the writing of, or associated with, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In addition to a book on the Lettres Provinciales (Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales: a study in polemic, 1989) and editions of La Bruyère (Dialogues sur le Quiétisme) and Voltaire / Condorcet (Eloge et Pensées de Pascal), he has recently published in book form the Bampton lectures which he delivered in 2009 (Catholic particularity in seventeenth-century France: Christianity is strange, 2011). He has recently worked on the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.

Research

Richard Parish has worked on French seventeenth-century theatre (Racine: the limits of tragedy, 1993; editions of Bérénice, Phèdre, Le Tartuffe), comic fiction, and in particular on the writing of, or associated with, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In addition to a book on the Lettres Provinciales (Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales: a study in polemic, 1989) and editions of La Bruyère (Dialogues sur le Quiétisme) and Voltaire / Condorcet (Eloge et Pensées de Pascal), he has recently published in book form the Bampton lectures which he delivered in 2009 (Catholic particularity in seventeenth-century France: Christianity is strange, 2011). He is currently working on the Mémoires of Saint-Simon.

Teaching

Descartes (French sole); 16th-, 17th- and 18th-century periods plus all prescribed authors therein except Diderot; Gide (Paper XI) and middle-period options.

Publications

'Pascal's Lettres provinciales: from flippancy to fundamentals', Cambridge Companion to Pascal, ed. Nicholas Hammond (2003), 182-200



'Métamorphoses de Racine: la Phaedra de Benjamin Britten', Jean Racine 1699-1999, ed. Gilles Declercq and Michèle Rosellini (2003), 685-695



'Je t'aime moi non plus; disjunction and the discourse of love in the seventeenth century', Seventeenth-Century French Studies, Vol. 24 (2002), 17-28



Scarron: Le Roman comique, Critical Guides to French Texts (London, Grant & Cutler, 1999)



'L'hapax legomenon dans le théâtre tragique de Racine', in: Bénédicte Louvat and Dominique Moncond'huy, Racine poète (Poitiers, La Licorne, 1999), 343-53