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A. Curulla, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama

A. Curulla, Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama

Publié le par Marc Escola (Source : Emma Burridge)

Gender and Religious Life in French Revolutionary Drama

by Annelle Curulla

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2018:11

ISBN: 9781786941404, 216 pages, £65.00

 

In her study of French revolutionary theatre and performance, Annelle Curulla relates a little known corpus of plays to shifting notions of gender, family, religiosity and nation in an effort to account for the complex process of secularization as it played out in the literary and cultural practice of theatre.

  • The first book to examine secularization in the context of French revolutionary theatre.
  • Uncovers an overlooked, yet crucial, facet of the revolutionary theatrical imagination.
  • Offers fresh insight on the gendered dimensions of revolutionary theatre.
  • Unearths a range of archival sources to consider questions of performance and reception alongside literary readings.
  • Contextualizes little-known plays in the literary and cultural landscape both before and after 1789.

 

Table of Contents

Introduction: the cloister and the stage
Historical context
Approaches and sources

1. Theatrical vocations: La Harpe’s Mélanie, ou la Religieuse (1770-1802)
Mélanie’s instability: revisions to the text (1770-1802)
Mélanie in the salons
From salon to stage: Mélanie in the Revolution (1790-1792)
Reviving Mélanie (1796-1802)
Conclusion

2. Changing habits: the monastic trope as secularisation, 1790 and 1791
Prisoners of the cloth: impossible love in monastic drama
Taking it off: secularisation as comedy
Over the line? Plays that failed
Conclusion

3. Dramaturgies of the cloister in Les Victimes cloîtrées
Places of the forgotten: legends of monastic prisons
The origins of the double scene
Reading the double scene
Conclusion

4. Mother–daughter plots in monastic drama
The pregnant nun in D’Alembert’s Eloge de Fléchier (1778)
From sentimental to Gothic motherhood: Pougens’s Julie, ou la Religieuse de Nîme
Maternal heroism in Olympe de Gouges
Republican family values: Chénier’s Fénelon, ou les Religieuses de Cambra
Conclusion

5. Brotherly orders: soldiers, monks and libertines in monastic comed
Persistent libertines: Les Visitandines
Brotherhood or else: La Partie carrée
Pigault-Lebrun: fraternity between the sexes
Conclusion

Conclusion: lessons of the cloister

Appendix 1: examples of the monastic trope in Revolutionary drama

Appendix 2: bibliography of printed examples of the monastic trope

Bibliography

Index

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Annelle Curulla is Assistant Professor of French at Scripps College, USA.

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.