Roger Pearson is a Professor of French at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in French at the Queen's College, Oxford. His research is focused on French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his publications include monographs on Stendhal, Voltaire, and Mallarmé, as well as translations of Voltaire, Zola, and Maupassant. This book marks completion of the first part of a research project on the Poet as Lawgiver in Nineteenth-Century France, for which he was awarded a Major Leverhulme Research Fellow (2009-11). He is a Fellow of the British Academy.