A Voyage into Tartary (1689): literary utopia of a French libertine

• Grant number: 15/22832-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: February 01, 2016
• End date: July 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Modern Foreign Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel
• Grantee: Bruna Pereira Caixeta
• Supervisor: Gregory Richard Claeys
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of London, England
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/08338-3 - A Voyage into Tartary (1689): literary utopia of a French libertine, BP.DR

Abstract

This research project aims to finalize the drafting of the translation into Portuguese and the critical study for A Voyage into Tartary, a utopia written in English and published in London in 1689, without indication of author - only signed by the narrator, "Mr. Heliogenes L'Epy, Doctor of Philosophy". This work brings together the travel reports that the narrator does to Rome, Greece, Byzantium, Georgia, Philippines and his discovery of the utopian Heliopolis, a city of the sun influenced by La Cità del Sole (1602) of Campanella, Les États et Empires du Soleil (1662) of Cyrano de Bergerac and L'Histoire de Sévarambes (1675) of Denis Veiras. As a whole, the Voyage discusses, with priority events in the history of France in the most despotic government phase of Louis XIV, and at the time of the rise of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance of the republican spirit of Greek model - the paideia, according to meaning elaborated by Werner Jaeger - as opposed to the absolutist regimes. According to our latest analysis, the fiction has been linked to the production of the English rationalists and also exposed a Europe ravaged by religious wars and the political interests in the nascent colonial empire.