Aspects of Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Thought PDF Download

Author: Robert McBride
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349036005
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Author: Katherine Ibbett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351881418
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Engaging with recent thinking about performance, political theory and canon formation, this study addresses the significance of the formal changes in seventeenth-century French theater. Each chapter takes up a particularity of seventeenth-century theatrical style and staging”for example, the clearing of violence from the stage”and shows how the conceptualization of these French stylistic shifts appropriates a rich body of Italian political writing on questions of action, temporality, and law. The theater's appropriation of political concerns and vocabularies, the author argues, proffers an astute reflection on the practices of government that draws attention to questions obscured in reason of state, such as the instrumentalization of women's bodies. In a new reading of tragedies about government, the author shows how the canonical figure of Pierre Corneille is formally engaged with the political strategizing he often appears to repudiate, and in so doing challenges a literary history that has read neoclassicism largely as a display of pure French style.

Author: Derval Conroy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781137568472
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Andrew Calder
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567042782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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The history of ideas provides an important means of understanding and reinterpreting the literature of the past; and in this study Dr. Calder demonstrates the illumination that this informed approach brings to the comedies of MoliFre. In the course of this study, the author outlines a fresh theory of classical comedy which applies to the works of other French writers of the 17th century; and the historical reinterpretations of MoliFre's two most difficult plays -- Le Tartuffe and Dom Juan -- break entirely new ground.Although this is a work which specialists will admire, it is also intended to serve as an introduction to MoliFre and French classical comedy at large and will be of considerable value to younger students and readers of MoliFre in general.

Author: Michael Moriarty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521306868
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This book analyses the use of the crucial concept of 'taste' in the works of five major seventeenth-century French authors, Méré, Saint Evremond, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Boileau. It combines close readings of important texts with a thoroughgoing political analysis of seventeenth-century French society in terms of class and gender. Dr Moriarty shows that far from being timeless and universal, the term 'taste' is culture-specific, shifting according to the needs of a writer and his social group. The notion of 'taste' not only helped to shape a new dominant culture, but also registered the conflicts within that culture between a view of taste that presupposted the values of 'polite society' as an exclusive (though not necessarily aristocratic) group, and a view that stressed the value of the classical-humanist tradition as a source of standards ratified by a broader public. this study sheds light not only on the central concept, but also on the individual authors discussed and on the norms of French classical literature in general.

Author: Richard G. Hodgson
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557532183
Category : Maxims, French
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Through close textual analysis of La Rochefoucauld's writings, Richard Hodgson studies the moralist's use of metaphors such as the mask as well as his very personal concept of what constitutes an etre vrai, or genuine person. The study then traces the impact of La Rochefoucauld's ideas on thinkers from Vauvenargues and Chamfort to Nietzsche, Lautreamont, and Lacan. It concludes by suggesting reasons why La Rochefoucauld's concept of truth continues to have such enormous appeal to the modern reader.

Author: Eleanor F. Jourdain
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9781330337462
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Excerpt from An Introduction to the French Classical Drama If we assume with the large majority of French critics that the seventeenth century was the time in which French art most truly reflected the ideal qualities of the French nation as a whole, we shall be anxious to discover in the literature of that century what it is that marks it off from the pscudo-classical literature of the age of Anne in England, and why the Siede d'or is a truer epithet as applied to France than the 'Augustan age' as applied to England. It was, in the first place, the age of the greatest French dramatists : and it is not generally disputed that though the genius of the French can be expressed in beautiful and lucid prose, whether in the seventeenth-century 'period' or the freer, more pictured phrase of modern times, yet the drama offers to the French spirit its greatest opportunities. Perhaps one reason for this is to be seen in a consideration of the national temperament. In contrast to the genius of the Teuton, which tends to express the thought and emotion of the individual, the French mind tends to express in art and literature the thought and feeling of man as part of a society. 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.

Author: Sir George Norman Clark
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Author: Derval Conroy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349571673
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Ruling Women is a two-volume study devoted to an analysis of the conflicting discourses concerning government by women in seventeenth-century France. In this second volume, Configuring the Female Prince in Seventeenth-Century French Drama, Conroy analyzes over 30 plays published between 1637 and 1691, examining the range of constructions of queenship that are thrown into relief. The analysis focuses on the ways in which certain texts strive to manage the cultural anxiety produced by female rule and facilitate the diminution of the uneasy cultural reality it represents, while others dramatize the exercise of political virtue by women, explode the myth of gender-differentiated sexual ethics, and suggest alternative constructions of gender relations to those upheld by the normative discourses of sexual difference. The approach is underpinned by an understanding of theatre as fundamentally political, a cultural institution implicated in the maintenance of, and challenge to, societal power relations. Innovative and stimulating, Conroy’s work will appeal to scholars of seventeenth-century drama and history of ideas, in addition to those interested in the history of women in political thought and the history of feminism.

Author: Christopher Braider
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442696214
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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What influence did René Descartes' concept of mind-body dualism have on early modern conceptions of the self? In The Matter of Mind, Christopher Braider challenges the presumed centrality of Descartes' groundbreaking theory to seventeenth-century French culture. He details the broad opposition to rational self-government among Descartes' contemporaries, and attributes conventional links between Descartes and the myth of the ‘modern subject’ to post-structuralist assessments. The Matter of Mind presents studies drawn from a range of disciplines and examines the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, the drama of Pierre Corneille, and the theology of Blaise Pascal. Braider argues that if early modern thought converged on a single model, then it was the experimental picture based on everyday experience proposed by Descartes' sceptical adversary, Michel de Montaigne. Forceful and provocative, The Matter of Mind will encourage lively debate on the norms and discourses of seventeenth-century philosophy.