Spectators on the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Spectators on the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Barbara G. Mittman
Publisher: Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press
ISBN:
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description

Spectators on the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Spectators on the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF Author: Barbara G. Mittman
Publisher: Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Research Press
ISBN:
Category : Theater
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description


The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe

The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe PDF Author: James Van Horn Melton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521469692
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
James Melton examines the rise of the public in 18th-century Europe. A work of comparative synthesis focusing on England, France and the German-speaking territories, this a reassessment of what Habermas termed the bourgeois public sphere.

Political Actors

Political Actors PDF Author: Paul Friedland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724231
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
From the start of the French Revolution, contemporary observers were struck by the overwhelming theatricality of political events. Examples of convergence between theater and politics included the election of dramatic actors to powerful political and military positions and reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and planting paid "claqueurs" in the audience to applaud their employers on demand. Meanwhile, in a mock national assembly that gathered in an enormous circus pavilion in the center of Paris, spectators paid for the privilege of acting the role of political representatives for a day.Paul Friedland argues that politics and theater became virtually indistinguishable during the Revolutionary period because of a parallel evolution in the theories of theatrical and political representation. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, actors on political and theatrical stages saw their task as embodying a fictional entity—in one case a character in a play, in the other, the corpus mysticum of the French nation. Friedland details the significant ways in which after 1750 the work of both was redefined. Dramatic actors were coached to portray their parts abstractly, in a manner that seemed realistic to the audience. With the creation of the National Assembly, abstract representation also triumphed in the political arena. In a break from the past, this legislature did not claim to be the nation, but rather to speak on its behalf. According to Friedland, this new form of representation brought about a sharp demarcation between actors—on both stages—and their audience, one that relegated spectators to the role of passive observers of a performance that was given for their benefit but without their direct participation. Political Actors, a landmark contribution to eighteenth-century studies, furthers understanding not only of the French Revolution but also of the very nature of modern representative democracy.

The Contested Parterre

The Contested Parterre PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Ravel
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724622
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court—and later its Enlightened opponents—to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.

European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900

European Theatre Performance Practice, 1750–1900 PDF Author: Jim Davis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351938290
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 567

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Book Description
This volume contains key articles and chapters which represent both seminal and innovative scholarship on European theatre performance practice from 1750 to 1900. The selected topics focus on acting and performance, staging (including set design and lighting), and audiences, and are approached with a broad perspective as well as with in-depth, focussed analysis. The volume captures the rich, dynamic and variegated nature of European theatre throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provides a carefully selected body of significant texts on this important period of theatre history.

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Thomas Wynn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198895321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Thomas Wynn explores how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, the mode of closet drama: plays that were never performed within the playhouse. Drawing on queer theory, Wynn argues that eighteenth-century closet reading fostered disruptive pleasures that imparted another side to the period's 'théâtromanie'.

The Age of Cultural Revolutions

The Age of Cultural Revolutions PDF Author: Colin Jones
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520229679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
"This superb collection of essays brings together the most exciting new work in cultural and literary history. Although the authors focus on the various cultural revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the significance of their investigations extends far beyond that moment. They show how the major categories of modern social life took root in this era, but they emphasize the surprising and often paradoxical ways those developments took place. Nothing about the experience of class, gender, race, nation, sentiment or even death was pre-ordained. These essays will enable readers to take a fresh new look at the origins of modernity."—Lynn Hunt, editor of The New Cultural History and coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn "This is a valuable and provocative set of essays. Differing markedly in subject matter, they are linked by their intelligence and concern to re-assess early modern English and French histories, and the differences conventionally drawn between them, in the light of current work on language, class, race and gender."—Linda Colley, author of Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837

The Mind-Body Stage

The Mind-Body Stage PDF Author: R. Darren Gobert
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478826X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage and thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs. The Mind-Body Stage provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents (including letters, libretti, religious jeremiads, aesthetic treatises, and architectural plans) from several countries.

French Theatre in the Neo-classical Era, 1550-1789

French Theatre in the Neo-classical Era, 1550-1789 PDF Author: William Driver Howarth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521230131
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
This 1997 book covers the period which saw the establishment in France of a centralized official theatre - not only the Comédie-Française (the first 'national' theatre), but an Italian theatre and a state opera; the often subversive independent theatres are also discussed. Nearly 1,000 documents deal with censorship and other aspects of external control, company management, the acting profession, dramatic theory and criticism, theatre architecture, settings and costumes, audience composition and behaviour. Over 120 pictorial documents - architectural drawings, technical engravings, frontispieces, portraits, etc. - provide a visual dimension where relevant. A full linking narrative and a copious bibliography help to make this an important reference work and a valuable research tool.

Historical Dictionary of French Theater

Historical Dictionary of French Theater PDF Author: Edward Forman
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810874512
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The term "French theater" evokes most immediately the glories of the classical period and the peculiarities of the Theater of the Absurd. It has given us the works of Corneille, Racine, and Moliere. In the Romantic era there was Alexander Dumas and surrealist works of Alfred Jarry, and then the Theater of the Absurd erupted in rationalistic France with Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The Historical Dictionary of French Theater relates the history of the French theater through a chronology, introduction, bibliography, and over 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on authors, trends, genres, concepts, and literary and historical developments that played a central role in the evolution of French theater.