French theatre (1700s-1830s) and the making of revolutions: politics, love and fantasy...
Affiliation
French theatre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries arose as a major forum for the dissemination of philosophical and political debates that led up to the French Revolution, and later, following Napoleon's fall, to more political unrest during the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830). It also gave birth to the drame bourgeois, and the drame romantique, both questioning and rejecting the 'old ways', be it at an aesthetic or ideological level, or both. While exploring the ways in which playwrights (both male and female) engaged with contemporary politics and societal issues, this course will also reflect, through close analysis of the primary texts, on the many dramaturgic strategies (e.g: recycling of well-trodden comedic plots, of romantic doomed tales, etc., and also stylitic and thematic innovation, paving the way for more literary revolutions ) which these authors used through their texts to convey their critique of, and beliefs in, a better society, while investing their texts with an everlasting appeal to today's audiences.
Credit Level: 10
Year taken: Year 4 Undergraduate
SCQF Credits: 20
Not running in 2025/26