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The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

Book

The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

DOI link for The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution book

The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

DOI link for The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution

The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution book

ByCecilia Feilla
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2013
eBook Published 14 March 2016
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315552996
Pages 274
eBook ISBN 9781315552996
Subjects Arts, Humanities
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Feilla, C. (2013). The Sentimental Theater of the French Revolution (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315552996

ABSTRACT

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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |18 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|46 pages

The Bestsellers of the French Revolution, or, Why Sentimentality Dominated the Revolutionary Stage: Four Case Studies

(La Mère coupable, Le Déserteur, Fénelon, and Les Deux petits savoyards)

chapter 2|28 pages

Revolutionary Tableaux: Diderot, David, and the Sentimental Frame of Politics

chapter 3|34 pages

Sentimental Vows and the Affective Bonds of Social Contract: National and Private Theatricals in Collot d’Herbois’s La Famille Patriote (1790)

chapter 4|35 pages

Virtue’s Proofs: Paméla on Stage and on Trial during the Terror

chapter 5|34 pages

Virtuous Citizen, Suffering Father: Voltaire’s Brutus and the Sentimentalization of Political Tragedy

chapter 6|28 pages

Acting Revolution: Talma and the Sentimental Body

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