Author: Robert McBride
Publisher: Lewiston, N.Y. : E. Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Get Book Here
Book Description
This study points to the evidence that during Moliere's most creative period in Paris, comedy and ballet were increasingly integrated in a unified spectacle. They are not viewed as competing art forms, but in a natural and complementary relationship. In the evolution of comic form, ballet is seen to offer aesthetic patterns through which comedy comments on characters who themselves, in the cyclic circular rhythms regulating behaviour and speech, possess a strong affinity with ballet.
Author: Georgia Cowart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116387
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia J. Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority.
Author: David Bradby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827294
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 11
Get Book Here
Book Description
A detailed introduction to Molière and his plays, this Companion evokes his own theatrical career, his theatres, patrons, the performers and theatre staff with whom he worked, and the various publics he and his troupes entertained with such success. It looks at his particular brands of comedy and satire. L'École des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Dom Juan, Le Misanthrope, L'Avare and Les Femmes savantes are examined from a variety of different viewpoints, and through the eyes of different ages and cultures. The comedies-ballets, a genre invented by Molière and his collaborators, are re-instated to the central position which they held in his œuvre in Molière's own lifetime; his two masterpieces in this genre, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire, have chapters to themselves. Finally, the Companion looks at modern directors' theatre, exploring the central role played by productions of his work in successive 'revolutions' in the dramatic arts in France.
Author: James F. Gaines
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031307657X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 549
Get Book Here
Book Description
Born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, the French playwright Moli^D`ere became one of the most influential dramatists of the 17th century. His comedies shaped the development of theater in Europe, inspired his contemporaries in England, and left a lasting dramatic legacy after his death in 1673. Moli^D`re has also inspired a vast body of scholarship, and recent work has dispelled many of the myths surrounding his career. This reference provides English-speaking readers with a current and comprehensive guide to his life and works. Hundreds of A-Z entries cover topics related to his life, works, and theatrical career, including: Plays; Individual characters; Historical persons; Allusions; Influences; Cultural institutions; And much more. This scrupulously researched volume relies on verifiable facts, giving scant attention to the romantic fiction surrounding the playwright. Many of the entries list works for further reading. A chronology outlines the chief events of Moli^D`re's life and his contributions to the stage. The volume concludes with a bibliography.
Author: John S. Powell
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780198165996
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 622
Get Book Here
Book Description
During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien régime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musical practices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comédie-Française.
Author: Michael Hawcroft
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191527939
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
Molière wrote, directed, and starred in comedies for public and court audiences in seventeenth-century France. He is perennially successful, but perennially subject to critical controversy: do his plays aim to do more than make audiences laugh? This book focuses on a group of characters in the plays, the interpretation of whose role lies at the heart of any answer to this question. For over a century critics have baptised them 'raisonneurs'. They are characters who engage with some of Molière's most foolish protagonists, but they have been variously interpreted as exponents of wisdom or as ridiculous bores. This book argues that new light can be shed on the words and actions of these characters, and so on the tenor of the plays as a whole, by detailed contextual analysis of the dramaturgical and comic structures in which they operate. They have never before been treated so exhaustively. They emerge neither as the mouthpieces of common sense nor as pompous fools, but as thoughtful, witty, and resourceful friends of the foolish protagonists whom Molière himself played. The book takes into account what is known of the performance styles of Molière's troupe of actors as well as engaging closely with the text of the plays and the critical debate to date. Some of Molière's most teasingly problematic plays are held up to fresh scrutiny, including L'Ecole des femmes, Le Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, and Le Malade imaginaire. The book is written with scholars, students, and interested theatre-goers in mind. This is the first book-length treatment of the topic.
Author: Graham Gargett
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042016927
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume, prompted by the publication in 1999 of Moya Longstaffe's remarkable study, Metamorphoses of Passion and the Heroic in French Literature: Corneille, Stendhal, Claudel, further investigates and analyses the multiple appearances of Passion and Heroism in literature. It pursues the exploration of these themes in a variety of cultures (English, French, German, Spanish), genres, and critical approaches. In addition, the chronological span represented is extremely wide. Contributions range from La Fontaine, Molière and Voltaire to Rimbaud and Camus; from Baudelaire to Beckett; from Wagner to Goytisolo. This very diversity gives necessary context, providing scope for reflection and analysis. Although passion seems timeless, can heroism have any real meaning - apart from an individual and existential one - in our postmodern age? Has a notion at the centre of European culture for so many centuries really disappeared from our intellectual and cultural universe? This volume will be of interest to all students of literature, whatever their critical or linguistic allegiance, since it focuses on the varying manifestations of two vital ingredients of all societies and cultures.
Author: Gretchen Elizabeth Smith
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
The comedie-ballet was a spectacular theatrical genre which blossomed in the first year of Louis XIV's absolute rule (1661), flourished under the friendship of king and playwright during that decade (1664-1670), and faded even as Louis turned his attention to the new French opera in the early 1670s. Though it lasted little more than a decade, it stands not only as a unique chapter in Moliere's career as a playwright but as a singular style of theatre. Focusing on the topics of male nobility and class tensions, Gretchen Smith examines a unique performance genre in a new way: through its premiere performances in the context of the places, periods, performers, and the semiotics of practical theatre. Through telling the story of the comedies-ballets, the author redefines the Baroque as an era which shaped our post-modern ideas about performance as a social as well as theatrical construct, about magnificence as a commodity and a product to be bought or exported, about the seduction of the public spotlight, and about the political outcome of patronage and art. dimensions that are often neglected or understudied by literary scholars. Grounded in the disciplines of theatre history, literary analysis, semiotics, performance study, and gender studies, this study will also be useful for scholars French, European and early modern history and literature. It contributes much to our understanding of Moliere, the genre of the comedie-ballet, and the various layers of meaning in royal festival theater.
Author: E. S. Shaffer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521571487
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 310
Get Book Here
Book Description
Addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.
Author: Susan Harrow
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042025794
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book Here
Book Description
The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture. This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book's fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.
