Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Thomas Wynn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198895348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, of closet drama: excessive plays that cannot be performed within the playhouse's confines and which thus appeal to the reader's imagination. This period in France was characterized by 'théâtromanie', a craze that encompassed the page as well as the stage. The book's first part surveys the historical context in which plays were read and offers a theoretical model for understanding this practice. The eighteenth-century closet was valued as a privileged site of reading. Although scholars routinely present this room as a place of calm reflection, Thomas Wynn develops a framework (derived in part from queer theory) to argue that it fosters passionate and disruptive pleasures that elude the coercive normativity of the playhouse. To explore the multipositional experience of reading plays in this period, Wynn turns to the journal Mercure de France, whose extensive reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The second part examines how dramatists exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of the reading experience. It offers close analysis of several closet plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault's historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Rétif de La Bretonne's Le Drame de la vie (1793)—an extreme and arguably unsurpassed example of closet drama. Ultimately, this book shows, closet drama is not failed theatre but rather an indisputable part of the lively, passionate, and combative theatrical culture of eighteenth-century France.

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France

Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Thomas Wynn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198895348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, of closet drama: excessive plays that cannot be performed within the playhouse's confines and which thus appeal to the reader's imagination. This period in France was characterized by 'théâtromanie', a craze that encompassed the page as well as the stage. The book's first part surveys the historical context in which plays were read and offers a theoretical model for understanding this practice. The eighteenth-century closet was valued as a privileged site of reading. Although scholars routinely present this room as a place of calm reflection, Thomas Wynn develops a framework (derived in part from queer theory) to argue that it fosters passionate and disruptive pleasures that elude the coercive normativity of the playhouse. To explore the multipositional experience of reading plays in this period, Wynn turns to the journal Mercure de France, whose extensive reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The second part examines how dramatists exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of the reading experience. It offers close analysis of several closet plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault's historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Rétif de La Bretonne's Le Drame de la vie (1793)—an extreme and arguably unsurpassed example of closet drama. Ultimately, this book shows, closet drama is not failed theatre but rather an indisputable part of the lively, passionate, and combative theatrical culture of eighteenth-century France.

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France

Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Fayçal Falaky
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1684483425
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.

Eighteenth-century French plays

Eighteenth-century French plays PDF Author: Clarence Dietz Brenner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French drama
Languages : en
Pages : 596

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European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century

European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description


The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution PDF Author: Cecilia Feilla
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317016300
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Smoothly blending performance theory, literary analysis, and historical insights, Cecilia Feilla explores the mutually dependent discourses of feeling and politics and their impact on the theatre and theatre audiences during the French Revolution. Remarkably, the most frequently performed and popular plays from 1789 to 1799 were not the political action pieces that have been the subject of much literary and historical criticism, but rather sentimental dramas and comedies, many of which originated on the stages of the Old Regime. Feilla suggests that theatre provided an important bridge from affective communities of sentimentality to active political communities of the nation, arguing that the performance of virtue on stage served to foster the passage from private emotion to public virtue and allowed groups such as women, children, and the poor who were excluded from direct political participation to imagine a new and inclusive social and political structure. Providing close readings of texts by, among others, Denis Diderot, Collot d'Herbois, and Voltaire, Feilla maps the ways in which continuities and innovations in the theatre from 1760 to 1800 set the stage for the nineteenth century. Her book revitalizes and enriches our understanding of the significance of sentimental drama, showing that it was central to the way that drama both shaped and was shaped by political culture.

European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century (Classic Reprint)

European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century (Classic Reprint) PDF Author: Harry Kurz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781332718993
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Excerpt from European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century European nations except the Greeks and the Turks. The limits mentioned have been overstepped here and there when it seemed necessary. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers

Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers PDF Author: Faith E. Beasley
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603290951
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France has been celebrated as the period of conversation. Salons flourished and became an important social force. Women and men worked together, in dialogue with their contemporaries, other texts, and their culture to create novels, political satire, drama, poetry, fairy tales, travel narratives, and philosophy. Yet the inclusion of women's contributions, only recently recovered, changes the way we conceive of the period that constitutes one of the building blocks of French national identity and Western civilization, and teachers are often unsure how and where to incorporate the texts into their courses. Teaching Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers attempts to reconstruct these conversations by integrating women's work into classrooms across the curriculum. The works of French women writers are crucial to courses on the early modern period and enliven many others—whether on literature, history, women's history, the history of science, philosophy, women's and gender studies, or European civilization. The essays included in part 1 provide necessary background and help instructors identify places in their courses that could be enriched by taking women's participation into account. Contributors in part 2 focus on some of the central writers and genres of the period, including Lafayette, Charrière, and Graffigny, the epistolary novel, convent writing, and memoirs. The essays in part 3 offer concrete descriptions of courses that place women's texts in dialogue with those of their male colleagues or with historical issues.

Theater, War and Revolution in Eighteenth-century France and Its Empire

Theater, War and Revolution in Eighteenth-century France and Its Empire PDF Author: Logan J. Connors
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781009431248
Category : French drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This is the first study of the relationship between French theater and war at a time of revolution and colonial violence. Drawing together theater and performance studies, literary close-reading, cultural, military and gender history, it provides holistic analysis of theater's engagement with military activity at a time of radical transformation"--

The Eighteenth-century French Novel

The Eighteenth-century French Novel PDF Author: Vivienne Mylne
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719001741
Category : French fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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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.