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Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France
Author(s): Desmond Hosford (Author, Editor), Charles Wrightington (Author, Editor)
- Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Publication Date: 6 Jan. 2009
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 205 pages
- ISBN-10: 1847186556
- ISBN-13: 9781847186553
Book Description
As an aesthetic notion and dramatic genre, tragedy has enjoyed a privileged place in French culture, particularly during the early modern period when debates over its nature and philosophy reflected fascination with a style whose fundamental principles were drawn from ancient Greek sources. Through the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, routinely cited for an alleged regularity of form and content exemplifying the academic notion of French Classicism, tragedy has grounded the French literary canon. Because of its place at the heart of canonical French literary studies, tragedy’s traditionally prescribed boundaries and interpretations have rarely been questioned. Fortune and Fatality: Performing the Tragic in Early Modern France challenges conventional notions of the nature and function of tragedy and the ends to which philosophical, theatrical, and performative aspects of the tragic were appropriated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The scope of material explored in this volume will be of interest not only to scholars and students of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, but to those working in areas such as theater, gender studies, aesthetics, history, religion, philosophy, classics, and cultural studies.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Desmond Hosford is a Ph.D. candidate in French at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he also earned his Ph.D. in musicology. He specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tragedy, tragédie en musique, the Bourbon court of France, and early modern gender and sexuality. Desmond is an adjunct lecturer in French at Hunter College of the City University of New York and an editor at the Repertoire International de Littérature Musicale. Charles Wrightington is a Ph.D. candidate in French at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, specializing in seventeenth-century religious writings, including the French moralists, Jansenism, Jesuit pedagogy, and devout humanism. In addition to teaching French at St. Peter’s College, he has also taught philosophy at Georgetown and Fordham Universities.
