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  • Dennis Wood (1947–2018)

The sudden and unexpected death of Dennis Wood, Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Birmingham, on 25 May 2018, deprives the world of French studies of one of its foremost specialists in the fields of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French literature. His major scholarly interests lay in the writings of Isabelle de Charrière and Benjamin Constant, but he was a man with a formidable appetite for knowledge and whose interests ranged from Proto-Indo-European to twentieth-century French cinema.

Dennis was born in 1947 to Roman Catholic working-class parents in the Black Country. His secondary education was at St Philip's Grammar School in Birmingham, where he developed an enduring fascination for foreign languages and cultures. French came first, but Dennis also explored Spanish, Italian, German, Welsh, and Russian. (As a teenager, he went so far as to set himself personalized Russian language exams and create answer sheets for them.) He was as much intrigued by languages in their historical development as by their function as modes of communication. Language was for Dennis the bedrock of culture, and the study of language went hand in hand with that of literature.

Dennis pursued his undergraduate studies in French at King's College London where, after experiencing May 1968 at close quarters while serving as an assistant d'anglais in a Parisian lycée, he achieved a memorable first-class degree. He then moved to St John's College, Cambridge, and began doctoral work on the novels of the Dutch/Swiss writer Isabelle de Charrière/Belle van Zuylen (1740–1805) under the supervision of R. A. Leigh. He was appointed to a Lectureship in French at Birmingham in 1972, where he remained until his retirement. He taught courses on eighteenth-century French literature, but never abandoned his broader interests in modern French culture (his original intention had been to do research on Michel Butor). Many students were inspired by his course 'Literature and Criticism', which examined the Barthes–Picard controversy; the psychocriticism of Charles Mauron; and the sociology of literature of Lucien Goldmann. In more recent times he introduced a popular course on French Cinema ('Three French Directors: Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer'). However, the focus of his academic research remained firmly with the earlier periods. In 1979 he was invited to join an international editorial board which was constituted to produce a new scholarly edition of the works of Isabelle de Charrière (10 vols (Amsterdam: G. A. van Oorschot, 1979–84)). Dennis's biggest involvement lay with the volumes containing the prose fiction: VIII, Romans, contes et nouvelles I, 1763–1797 (1980) and IX, Romans, contes et nouvelles II, 1798–1806 (1981). Dennis the literary critic had by now [End Page 172] become a specialist in archival work and textual elucidation, subsequently deploying these skills to track down manuscripts in British and overseas libraries. When work on the Charrière edition was completed, Dennis moved to join the international team based in Lausanne that was preparing the new, monumental edition of Constant's works and correspondence. He was in particular responsible for the annotated text of Ma vie (still better known to most readers as Le Cahier rouge) in Benjamin Constant, Écrits littéraires 1800–1913, I (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995). Between 1991 and 2016 he played a vital role in the editing of Constant's Correspondance générale (11 vols (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer; Berlin: De Gruyter)). Dennis was Vice-President of the Commission de la correspondance and worked with a team of eminent collaborators (C. P. Courtney, Paul Delbouille, Adrianne Tooke, Boris Anelli, Paul Rowe) to produce what has become the standard, authoritative edition. Dennis always looked at Constant in the round, taking into account his life, loves, and intellectual environment. This approach bore fruit in his monograph, Constant: 'Adolphe' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), which appeared in the Landmarks in World Literature series, and in which he presented the novel in all its rich complexity to a new generation of students. In the same year, in collaboration with Ceri Crossley, he brought out a volume of essays, Constant in Britain / Constant et la Grande...

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