ABSTRACT
In 1683, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle published the first volume of his Nouveaux dialogues des morts. The text, which brought together a series of celebrated individuals in conversation in the afterlife, explicitly modeled itself on a work by Lucian of Samosata, written in the second century CE. Fontenelle was far from the only modern author to take on this classical model: Fénelon, Boileau, and Voltaire in France, and Lyttleton in England were just some of those who revived the famous dead across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But in the only full-length study of the form to date, Egilsrud identifies Fontenelle as its superlative example. The dialogues were immensely successful: the first volume was reprinted twice in the following months, a second volume followed at the end of the year, and a final section appeared in early 1684.
