Simone Weil Bibliography
Although Simone Weil died very young at age 34, her essays and notebooks have been the topic of a significant volume of scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines including Religion, Philosophy, Literature, Nursing, Political Science, History , Psychology, Education and Business. However, the last comprehensive bibliography of critical works on Simone Weil compiled by J.P. Little, dates back to 1973 with a supplement in 1979 and a small update in 1995. The diversity and range of this ongoing scholarship makes an updated comprehensive bibliography critically important for those writing on Weil and her work.
Saundra Lipton, University of Calgary and Debra Jensen, Mount Royal University have been active collaborators (till Debra’s untimely death July 15, 2012) in the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on Simone Weil. The goal of this project is to provide a valuable service to scholars and students in many fields by facilitating access to Weilian resources across disciplinary, geographic and linguistic divides. Publications worldwide have been surveyed. Over 5500 works have been discovered. This online version of the bibliography currently list more than 5000 book, essays, journal articles and theses.
I dedicate my continuing efforts on this project to the memory of my dear friend and colleague Debra Jensen.
Please forward suggestions for inclusion to Saundra Lipton
Content
My aim is to make this bibliography as comprehensive as possible for scholarly critical works published between 1995 and 2020. Excluded publications include: works by Simone Weil, items which could not be verified, brief book reviews, works which only contain a passing mention of her or simply quote from her work, blogs, papers written for classes, unpublished conference papers and reference works with brief entries on Weil.
I have collected references in all languages and published worldwide. English and French together comprise just over 50% of the total records collected to date with the remaining works in a wide variety of languages. The bibliography consists of journal articles (including substantive books reviews), books, book chapters, theses and essays.
Debra Jensen authored annotations for many of the English language works in the bibliography. With her passing, detailed annotations are no longer being produced. Keywords have been assigned to all English language works (except for book reviews) and much of the foreign language material.
Methodology
Sources consulted included:
- subscription databases
- library catalogues and national library catalogues – a number of library catalogues were excellent sources for identifying edited works containing sections on Weil
- union catalogues – WorldCat is most helpful for verification of information
- free databases – Dialnet is particularly useful in locating non-English material. (See Sources for a complete listing)
- Google books and HathiTrust – good for highlighting works containing sections on Weil
- bibliographies of all the works located
- bibliographies posted on the web (especially the ones posted at http://www.simoneweil.com.br/)
- ProQuest Dissertation was very helpful for highlighting a number of works whose titles belied the substantive content on Simone contained therein
