Florian Ponty

Florian Ponty is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow (Research Ireland) in the School of Languages at University College Dublin, under the mentorship of Professor Síofra Pierse. He specialises in French Studies and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on early modern speculative fiction, and in particular on imaginary voyages: how they were categorised and received, and what their formal and fictional features reveal about the status of literature and its relation to the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

He completed his doctorate in 2024 at Université Côte d’Azur (France) and Western University (Canada), under the supervision of Sylvie Ballestra-Puech and Jean Leclerc. His thesis studies Garnier’s thirty-six-volume collection Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques (1787–1789), which brings together works by Defoe, Swift, Voltaire and Cyrano de Bergerac alongside lesser-known authors, with two new illustrations by Clément-Pierre Marillier in each volume. Three key assertions emerge from the paratextual framework and are confirmed throughout the study. Firstly, imaginary voyages and related genres exhibit a strong tendency towards intertextuality and hypertextuality, as defined by Gérard Genette. Secondly, these fictions were classified at the time as ‘works of the imagination’, alongside fairy tales and Oriental tales. Finally, they are designed to have an educational impact on the reader, thereby contributing to a project of critical enlightenment. It is forthcoming with Classiques Garnier

His current project is a critical edition of Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines’s Le Nouveau Gulliver (1730), a sequel in which Gulliver’s son Jean travels to new imaginary lands. Desfontaines is best known for his French translation of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which helped popularise the novel in Europe, but his translation is closer to an adaptation, with passages altered for moral reasons and to suit what he took to be the expectations of French readers. The project reads the sequel alongside Swift’s text and Desfontaines’s translation to ask how a translator-continuator imagined his readership and which aesthetic and moral choices set his work apart from Swift’s. The edition will offer an introduction, annotation of literary and philosophical references, and a study of the illustrations in successive editions.