Issu d’un projet entamé il y a 8 ans, cette publication en 6 volumes des Thomas Paine Collected Writings (Princeton University Press) résulte d’un travail des éditeurs Marc Belissa (Université Paris Nanterre), Gary Berton (président de The Thomas Paine Historical Association), Yannick Bosc (GRHis – URN), Scott Cleary (Iona University), et Carine Lounissi (ERIAC – URN), sous la direction de Gregory Claeys (University of London). Elle renouvelle celle effectuée par Eric Foner en 1945, en actualisant les normes historiographiques et philologiques, et en doublant quasiment le corpus des œuvres de Paine.

Overview

Thomas Paine: Collected Writings is the first major new edition of Paine’s works, bringing together all his writings in six breathtaking volumes that dramatically revise our previous understanding of his activities as a writer and his importance as a democratic theorist in the age of revolutions. It includes about 180 new letters and some two hundred works newly attributed to Paine, with twenty-nine works previously regarded as Paine’s being deattributed. Drawing on pioneering computerized text analysis that makes possible for the first time attributions of anonymous and pseudonymous texts, this collection includes in volumes 5–6 newly identified pamphlets and newspaper and journal contributions, and suggests that Paine was extremely active as a Grub Street oppositional Whig writer in the decade prior to the American Revolution. Many writings from the period of his residence in France (1792–1802) and his subsequent return to the United States are also restored to his published output. Paine emerges as a much more consistent and serious democratic theorist than is often assumed, whose contributions to revolutionary debates in America, Britain, and France were unparalleled in their time.