Authors:
- Analyses how error is conceptualized in theatrical treatises, literary texts, medical texts, law and philosophy
- Offers original close readings of several canonical dramas
- Examines how philosophical notions of error in the German, French, and British realms interact with notions of the body and artistic performance of this period
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History (PSTPH)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Featuring detailed analyses of Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson, Diderot’s Le Fils naturel, Schiller’s Die Räuber, and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein alongside rich close readings of diverse primary sources, ranging from previously untranslated acting treatises by Sainte-Albine and Engel to texts from the German Archiv des Criminalrechts, this study introduces the reader to new Enlightenment sources and compellingly concludes that ultimately it is no longer evil, but rather bodily irregularities and mistakes in reading the body that become the driving principle of Enlightenment drama.
Reviews
“This book is as erudite as it is instructive. Attentive to on-stage affect, gesture, illness, stuttering and blushing, Pascale LaFountain shows how, in the wake of Lessing’s refusal tomoralize error unequivocally, Diderot, Schiller, Kleist and others increasingly locate the tragic flaw in the fallibility of the human body. Deftly tracing this incorporation of hamartia throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, LaFountain reveals how French and German-language theatrical traditions continuously draw upon and influence one another. Situating these reflections within their philosophical context, the implications of this investigation reach far beyond the evolving tragic genre, though, indeed opening new perspectives onto the very advent of the modern episteme, the beginnings of which LaFountain reveals to be an “epoch of error”.” (Ian Fleishman, University of Pennsylvania, USA, author of An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino)
“The focus on the concept of hamartia (error) is an original, intriguing,and productive approach that illustrates the changes in the self-understanding and reception of German drama in the second half of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. In the light of French and German acting theories the author shows in well-argued interpretations of plays by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Denis Diderot, Friedrich von Schiller, and Heinrich von Kleist how a completely new understanding of hamartia evolves.” (Monika Nenon, University of Memphis, USA)
Authors and Affiliations
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Montclair State University, Montclair, USA
Pascale LaFountain
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Theaters of Error
Book Subtitle: Problems of Performance in German and French Enlightenment Theater
Authors: Pascale LaFountain
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76632-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-76631-7Published: 01 May 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09539-0Published: 12 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-76632-4Published: 17 April 2018
Series ISSN: 2947-5767
Series E-ISSN: 2947-5775
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 313
Topics: Theatre History, Performing Arts, National/Regional Theatre and Performance, Eighteenth-Century Literature