Theatre studies Books

Book SynopsisÊThe King and IÊ opened on Broadway on March 29 1951. The musical is based on a 1944 novel by Margaret Landon ÊAnna and the King of SiamÊ which in turn was adapted from the real-life reminiscences of Anna Leonowens as recounted in her own books ÊThe English Governess at the Siamese CourtÊ and ÊThe Romance of the HaremÊ.ÞIt is 1862 in Siam when an English widow Anna Leonowens arrives with her young son at the Royal Palace in Bangkok having been summoned by the King to serve as tutor to his many children and wives. The King is largely considered to be a barbarian by those in the West and he seeks Anna''s assistance in changing his image if not his ways. With both keeping a firm grip on their respective traditions and values Anna and the King grow to understand and eventually respect one another in a truly unique love story. Along with the dazzling score the incomparable Jerome Robbins ballet ÊThe Small House of Uncle ThomasÊ is one of the all-time marvels of the musical sta

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Book SynopsisCAROUSEL: THE COMPLETE BOOK AND LYRICS OF THE BROADWAY MUSICAL

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Book SynopsisIs theater still relevant in this new century? The almost one hundred monologues in this collection prove that contemporary theater is alive vibrant and vital to our culture. The human experiences depicted in the works expose our hopes and fears our bravado and our masks as we live life in the first quarter of this new millennium.ÞDivided into monologues for men and women the selected pieces in ÊContemporary Monologues for a New TheaterÊ draw on the many diverse stories that weave the tapestry of our experience in this exciting new time. Performers and directors will become acquainted with the work of the many new playwrights they discover within these pages. And by performing these monologues actors will emerge with a better understanding of the diversity and the beauty of life on this planet at this point in human history gaining greater empathy toward those with different perspectives.ÞThe monologues hold a mirror up to society allowing audiences to see hidden reflections in

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Book SynopsisIn Staging Harmony, Katherine Steele Brokaw reveals how the relationship between drama, music, and religious change across England's long sixteenth century moved religious discourse to more moderate positions. It did so by reproducing the complex personal attachments, nostalgic overtones, and bodily effects that allow performed music to evoke the feeling, if not always the reality, of social harmony. Brokaw demonstrates how theatrical music from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries contributed to contemporary discourses on the power and morality of music and its proper role in religious life, shaping the changes made to church music as well as people's reception of those changes. In representing social, affective, and religious life in all its intricacy, and in unifying auditors in shared acoustic experiences, staged musical moments suggested the value of complexity, resolution, and compromise rather than oversimplified, absolutist binaries worth killing or dTrade Review[Staging Harmony]... is an engaging and historically well-informed work that explores the complex relationship of music and drama over the long sixteenth century, filling in the gaps that result from focusing too narrowly on the Elizabethan commercial theater to the exclusion of early Tudor interludes, Reformist morality plays, schoolboy dramas, and court and household entertainments. -- Jonathan Baldo, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester * Renaissance Quarterly *Staging Harmony offers a sophisticated account of theatrical engagement with music over a key period of dramatic production, a subtle description of early modern religious cultures, and a rich theorization of music’s role in embodied belief. * EARLY THEATRE *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Theater, Music, and Religion in the Long Sixteenth Century 1. Sacred, Sensual, and Social Music: Wisdom and the Digby Mary Magdalene 2. Musical Hypocrisy: The Plays of John Bale 3. Learning to Sing: The Plays of Nicholas Udall 4. Propaganda and Psalms: Early Elizabethan Drama 5. Sound Effects: Doctor Faustus 6. Arts to Enchant: The Tempest and The Winter's Tale

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Book SynopsisDuring the Russian Revolution and Civil War, amateur theater groups sprang up in cities across the country. Workers, peasants, students, soldiers, and sailors provided entertainment ranging from improvisations to gymnastics and from propaganda sketches to the plays of Chekhov. In Revolutionary Acts, Lynn Mally reconstructs the history of the amateur stage in Soviet Russia from 1917 to the height of the Stalinist purges. Her book illustrates in fascinating detail how Soviet culture was transformed during the new regime''s first two decades in power. Of all the arts, theater had a special appeal for mass audiences in Russia, and with the coming of the revolution it took on an important role in the dissemination of the new socialist culture. Mally''s analysis of amateur theater as a space where performers, their audiences, and the political authorities came into contact enables her to explore whether this culture emerged spontaneously from below or was imposed by the revoTrade Review"Mally traces the fascinating history of Soviet amateur theater from its heady origins in 1917 to its gradual ossification in the 1930s. The chapter on the TRAM amateur company is particularly engaging, nicely illustrating many of the the themes and debates in the amateur theater world."-Choice "Mally effectively situates the amateur theatrical movement within the larger context of cultural revolution. Mally places her study within the ongoing discussion of the genesis of totalitarian culture in general and of Socialist Realism in particular."-Russian Review "Mally sees true amateurism as original art and dilettantism of mere copying of professionals. The overarching theme of Revolutionary Acts is how Soviet amateur theater flourished luxuriantly (if contentiously) in a dozen varieties and was then 'de-amateurized' or semiprofessionalized under Joseph Stalin."-American Historical Review "Lynn Mally has found an underutilized focus through which one can view the dynamic evolution of Soviet culture, the interaction of intellectuals with Soviet power, and of elite culture with mass culture. It makes fascinating reading and given its interdisciplinary nature makes a valuable contribution to a variety of fields."-Katerina Clark, Yale University "Of all the arts in Russia and the USSR, theater possessed a special resonance with mass audiences. This superb book elegantly explores how a central feature of the cultural revolution was affected by the Soviet effort to transform everyday experience."--Diane P. Koenker, University of IllinoisTable of Contents1. The Revolution Loves the Theater2. Small Forms on Small Stages3. From "Club Plays" to the Classics4. TRAM: The Vanguard of Amateur Art5. Shock Workers on the Cultural Front6. Amateurs in the Spectacle State

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Book SynopsisFrom Gerald Ford''s preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump''s claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic theaters of pardoning in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare''s Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycleTrade ReviewA valuable contribution to Law and Humanities scholarship and reflection on the future of liberal constitutionalism, Meyler's book cuts to the quick of pardoning practices from seventeenth-century England to contemporary America. Highlighting both the seemingly irresistible draw of pardoning as a theatrical assertion of sovereign power and the revolutionary opportunities latent in the uncoupling of sovereignty from the figure of the sovereign ruler, Meyler pierces the illusion of absolute authority and sets out an alternative Arendtian vision for the state grounded in forgiveness. * The New Rambler *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Theaters of Pardoning 1. Dramatic Judgments: Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law 2. Emplotting Politics: James I and the "Powder Treason" 3. Non-Sovereign Forgiveness: Mercy among Equals in The Laws of Candy 4. From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger's The Bondman 5. Between Royal Pardons and Acts of Oblivion: The Transitional Justice of Cosmo Manuche and James Compton, Earl of Northampton 6. Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes's Recentering of Sovereignty Postlude: Pardoning and Liberal Constitutionalism Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFrom Gerald Ford''s preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump''s claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic theaters of pardoning in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty.Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare''s Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycleTrade ReviewA valuable contribution to Law and Humanities scholarship and reflection on the future of liberal constitutionalism, Meyler's book cuts to the quick of pardoning practices from seventeenth-century England to contemporary America. Highlighting both the seemingly irresistible draw of pardoning as a theatrical assertion of sovereign power and the revolutionary opportunities latent in the uncoupling of sovereignty from the figure of the sovereign ruler, Meyler pierces the illusion of absolute authority and sets out an alternative Arendtian vision for the state grounded in forgiveness. * The New Rambler *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Theaters of Pardoning 1. Dramatic Judgments: Measure for Measure, Revenge, and the Institution of the Law 2. Emplotting Politics: James I and the "Powder Treason" 3. Non-Sovereign Forgiveness: Mercy among Equals in The Laws of Candy 4. From Sovereignty to the State: The Tragicomic Clemency of Massinger's The Bondman 5. Between Royal Pardons and Acts of Oblivion: The Transitional Justice of Cosmo Manuche and James Compton, Earl of Northampton 6. Pardoning Revolution: The 1660 Act of Oblivion and Hobbes's Recentering of Sovereignty Postlude: Pardoning and Liberal Constitutionalism Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisFollowing World War II, German antifascists and nationalists in Buenos Aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. Competing Germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from European theaters to Buenos Aires and explores how two of Argentina''s most influential immigrant groups, German nationalists and antifascists (Jewish and non-Jewish), clashed on the city''s stages. Covered widely in German- and Spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident Nazi, antifascist, and Zionist platforms. Meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and Argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. Publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and Zionist populations were rife with infightingTrade ReviewAlthough Competing Germanies is a highly specialized study, it has broad implications and should elicit wide interest, especially given current global migrant and refugee crises. What this book illustrates so clearly is that anyone can become a refugee at any time and that all the world is but a stage wherein men and women are merely players with exit and entrance visas. * EuropeNow *A real strength of the book is the centering of theater and performance. It allows Kelz to document the nature of the German-speaking communities that emerged and to analyze how performance itself transmitted a sense of cultural identification. [...] Overall, this book's focus on theater allows Kelz to illuminate a broader history of German cultural production in Buenos Aires over three decades in the midtwentieth century and the interplay between institutions and larger communities * The German Quarterly *By offering insight into the workings of German immigrant theater in Argentina, Competing Germanies adds a much-needed cultural dimension and revives discourses over German-Argentine relations before and after 1945. The interdisciplinary and transnational nature of this text will be most useful to scholars working in history, Jewish culture and society, arts and/in exile, and theater and performance studies, and will establish a point of departure for related research projects in these and other areas * Central European History *In this impressive study, Robert Kelz portrays the cultural landscape and rivaling constituencies of German Argentina through the lens of theater performances. [...] In accessible and nuanced scholarly prose, Kelz presents the results of impeccable and extensive research, which he conducted in public archives and private collections in Argentina, Austria, and Germany * H-Net Reviews *It is a book overflowing with data, rich in the perspectives it opens up and with new information, an original contribution to studies on Nazis and anti-Nazis in Argentina * Iberoamericana America Latina-Espana-Portugal *Robert Kelz provides a quite different and novel slant in his splendid study of German exile literature from an earlier age. [...] Keltz offers a cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish and Latin-American polemic that will be welcomed by cultural historians and students of international affairs.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Argentina's Competing German Theaters 1. German Buenos Aires Asunder 2. Theater on the Move: Routes to Buenos Aires 3. Staging Dissidence: The Free German Stage 4. Hyphenated Hitlerism: Transatlantic Nazism Confronts Cultural Hybridity 5. Enduring Competition: German Theater in Argentina, 1946–1965 Epilogue

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Book SynopsisFollowing World War II, German antifascists and nationalists in Buenos Aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. Competing Germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from European theaters to Buenos Aires and explores how two of Argentina''s most influential immigrant groups, German nationalists and antifascists (Jewish and non-Jewish), clashed on the city''s stages. Covered widely in German- and Spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident Nazi, antifascist, and Zionist platforms. Meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and Argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. Publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and Zionist populations were rife with infightingTrade ReviewAlthough Competing Germanies is a highly specialized study, it has broad implications and should elicit wide interest, especially given current global migrant and refugee crises. What this book illustrates so clearly is that anyone can become a refugee at any time and that all the world is but a stage wherein men and women are merely players with exit and entrance visas. * EuropeNow *A real strength of the book is the centering of theater and performance. It allows Kelz to document the nature of the German-speaking communities that emerged and to analyze how performance itself transmitted a sense of cultural identification. [...] Overall, this book's focus on theater allows Kelz to illuminate a broader history of German cultural production in Buenos Aires over three decades in the midtwentieth century and the interplay between institutions and larger communities * The German Quarterly *By offering insight into the workings of German immigrant theater in Argentina, Competing Germanies adds a much-needed cultural dimension and revives discourses over German-Argentine relations before and after 1945. The interdisciplinary and transnational nature of this text will be most useful to scholars working in history, Jewish culture and society, arts and/in exile, and theater and performance studies, and will establish a point of departure for related research projects in these and other areas * Central European History *In this impressive study, Robert Kelz portrays the cultural landscape and rivaling constituencies of German Argentina through the lens of theater performances. [...] In accessible and nuanced scholarly prose, Kelz presents the results of impeccable and extensive research, which he conducted in public archives and private collections in Argentina, Austria, and Germany * H-Net Reviews *It is a book overflowing with data, rich in the perspectives it opens up and with new information, an original contribution to studies on Nazis and anti-Nazis in Argentina * Iberoamericana America Latina-Espana-Portugal *Robert Kelz provides a quite different and novel slant in his splendid study of German exile literature from an earlier age. [...] Keltz offers a cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish and Latin-American polemic that will be welcomed by cultural historians and students of international affairs.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Argentina's Competing German Theaters 1. German Buenos Aires Asunder 2. Theater on the Move: Routes to Buenos Aires 3. Staging Dissidence: The Free German Stage 4. Hyphenated Hitlerism: Transatlantic Nazism Confronts Cultural Hybridity 5. Enduring Competition: German Theater in Argentina, 1946–1965 Epilogue

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Book SynopsisWays of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investmentsglobal traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophisticationthis intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism''s most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light.Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this periodincluding technical innovations Trade ReviewThis well-argued, thought-provoking book argues for the key role of theater in the development of English cosmopolitanism and imperialism during the Restoration and 18th century. Well written and persuasive, the book significantly furthers the study of Restoration theater and its connections to the politics of empire. -- L. S. Stanavage, SUNY Potsdam * Choice *With regard to the study of emotions as culturally and temporally specific phenomena, Ways of the World has much on offer. * Emotions: History, Culture & Society *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. All Roads Lead to Rhodes: William Davenant, Ottomanphilia, and the Reinvention of Theater in the Restoration 2. Travestie: William Wycherley, the Fop, and the Provincial Girl 3. Indian Queens and the Queen Who Brought the Indies: Dryden, Settle, and the Tragedies of Empire 4. Restoration Legacies: Tragic Monarchs, Exotic and Enslaved 5. "Have You Not Been Sophisticated?": The Afterlife of the Restoration Actress 6. Histories of Their Own Times: Burnet, Cibber, and Rochester Epilogue: Mr. Spectator, Adam Smith, and the New Global Citizenship

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Book SynopsisSince its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law offers a revealing look into the legal community''s response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. A star-powered cast of legal mindsfrom two former U.S. solicitors general to leading commentators on culture and societycontribute brief and engaging magazine-style articles to this lively book. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton''s inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understaTrade ReviewWhether or not readers have a strong grounding in the law, they'll be stirred by the connections the book draws among Hamilton, current events, and history. * Library Journal *Hamilton and the Law shows us a look in the mirror and asks – can we abandon the founder myths so that we can realize our present-day reality and strive towards substantive equity for all? Hamilton, adored by millions, may be the pop culture medium that helps us heal our inconsistent conceptualizations of America's past, present, and future. Applause to you, Professor Tucker. * Hedgehogs and Foxes Blog *The collection has the seemingly incongruous effect of simultaneously drawing you into our formative history and the making of "Hamilton: An American Musical," while also contemplating the intractable issues facing us today. In this way, it invites readers to think not only about the relationships between art, law and society, but also the possible narratives one can tell about the America of days gone by and the ways in which those narratives can shape our future. * Law360 *Lisa A. Tucker has succeeded in using the innovation and exuberance of Lin-Manuel Miranda's ground-breaking musical to explore a wide range of legal, social, and historical issues. A smart and original book. * Los Angeles Review of Books *The book would be good for collections on law and current affairs. * Choice *Although the musical is not without its historical inaccuracies and criticisms, it is an undeniable reminder of the powers of storytelling, representation, and the arts. Books such as Hamilton and the Law amplify said powers by bringing the material to new audiences and providing scholarly commentaries on a mix of legal, social, political, and cultural topics. * Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books Review *Table of ContentsPart 1: "And so the American Experiment Begins": The Constitution and the Three Branches of Government 1. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Future of Originalism, Richard Primus 2. Some Alexander Hamilton, but Not So Much Hamilton, in the New Supreme Court, John Q. Barrett 3. Tragedy in the Supreme Court: "I'd Rather Be Divisive Than Indecisive", Lisa A. Tucker 4. Alexander Hamilton's "One Shot" before the U.S. Supreme Court, Gregory G. Garre 5. "Never Gon' Be President Now", Michael Gerhardt 6. Hamilton: Child Laborer and Truant, Paul M. Secunda Part 2: "America, You Great Unfinished Symphony" 7. Hamilton's America—and Ours, Kermit Roosevelt III 8. Hamilton and Washington at War and a Vision for Federal Power, Elizabeth B. Wydra 9. Two Oaths: Supporting and Defending the Constitution with Hamilton, Jill I. Goldenziel Part 3: "We'll Never Be Truly Free": Hamilton and Race 10. Finding Constitutional Redemption through Hamilton, Christina Mulligan 11. Race, Nation, and Patrimony, or, the Stakes of Diversity in Hamilton, Anthony Paul Farley 12. "The World Turned Upside Down": Employment Discrimination, Race, and Authenticity in Hamilton, Marcia L. McCormick 13. Hamilton and the Power of Racial Fables in Examining the U.S. Constitution, Danielle Holley-Walker Part 4: "I'm 'a Compel Him to Include Women in the Sequel" 14. On Women's Rights, Legal Change, and Incomplete Sequels, Eloise Pasachoff 15. When Your Job Is to Marry Rich: Marriage as a Market in Hamilton, Kimberly Mutcherson 16. "Love" Triangles: Romance or Domestic Violence?, Rosa Frazier Part 5: "Immigrants, We Get the Job Done" 17. Hamilton's Dissent to the Travel Ban, Neal Katyal 18. Hamilton and the Limits of Contemporary Immigration Narratives, Anil Kalhan 19. Hamilton's Immigrant Story Today, Elizabeth Keyes Part 6: "The Ten Duel Commandments" 20. Hamilton, Hip-Hop, and the Culture of Dueling in America, Glenn Harlan Reynolds 21. Alexander Hamilton, Citizen-Protector?, Jody Madeira 22. We Will Never Be Satisfied: Hamilton and Jefferson's Duel Over Constitutional Meaning, Ian Millhiser 23. Hamilton, Burr, and Defamation: Physical versus Verbal Duels, Benjamin Barton 24. Elections as Duels: "You Know What? We Can Change That. You Know Why?" 'Cuz We Have the Support of Two-Thirds of Each House of Congress and Three-Quarters of the States!, Joshua A. Douglas 25. Modern-Day Protests: As American as Apple Pie, Kimberly Jade Norwood Part 7: "Who Tells Your Story?" 26. Every Action's an Act of Creation: Hamilton and Copyright Law, Rebecca Tushnet 27. Hollering to Be Heard: Copyright and the Aesthetics of Voice, Zahr K. Said 28. Taking Law School Musicals Seriously: A Little Love Letter to Legal Musicals and the Lawyers Who Love Them, Robin J. Effron 29. "The World Turned Upside Down": Hamilton and Deconstruction, Bret D. Asbury Part 8: "What Is a Legacy?": Lessons from Hamilton beyond the Libretto 30. "Cabinet Battle #1": The Structure of Federalism, Erwin Chemerinsky 31. Hamilton's Bank and Jefferson's Nightmare, Mehrsa Baradaran 32. Alexander Hamilton's Legacy: The American Board of Directors, M. Todd Henderson 33. I Never Thought I'd Live Past Twenty": Hamilton through the Lens of Anticipated Early Death, Sarah Fishel

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Book SynopsisSince its Broadway debut, Hamilton: An American Musical has infused itself into the American experience: who shapes it, who owns it, who can rap it best. Lawyers and legal scholars, recognizing the way the musical speaks to some of our most complicated constitutional issues, have embraced Alexander Hamilton as the trendiest historical face in American civics. Hamilton and the Law offers a revealing look into the legal community''s response to the musical, which continues to resonate in a country still deeply divided about the reach of the law. A star-powered cast of legal mindsfrom two former U.S. solicitors general to leading commentators on culture and societycontribute brief and engaging magazine-style articles to this lively book. Intellectual property scholars share their thoughts on Hamilton''s inventive use of other sources, while family law scholars explore domestic violence. Critical race experts consider how Hamilton furthers our understaTrade ReviewWhether or not readers have a strong grounding in the law, they'll be stirred by the connections the book draws among Hamilton, current events, and history. * Library Journal *Hamilton and the Law shows us a look in the mirror and asks – can we abandon the founder myths so that we can realize our present-day reality and strive towards substantive equity for all? Hamilton, adored by millions, may be the pop culture medium that helps us heal our inconsistent conceptualizations of America's past, present, and future. Applause to you, Professor Tucker. * Hedgehogs and Foxes Blog *The collection has the seemingly incongruous effect of simultaneously drawing you into our formative history and the making of "Hamilton: An American Musical," while also contemplating the intractable issues facing us today. In this way, it invites readers to think not only about the relationships between art, law and society, but also the possible narratives one can tell about the America of days gone by and the ways in which those narratives can shape our future. * Law360 *Lisa A. Tucker has succeeded in using the innovation and exuberance of Lin-Manuel Miranda's ground-breaking musical to explore a wide range of legal, social, and historical issues. A smart and original book. * Los Angeles Review of Books *The book would be good for collections on law and current affairs. * Choice *Although the musical is not without its historical inaccuracies and criticisms, it is an undeniable reminder of the powers of storytelling, representation, and the arts. Books such as Hamilton and the Law amplify said powers by bringing the material to new audiences and providing scholarly commentaries on a mix of legal, social, political, and cultural topics. * Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books Review *Table of ContentsPart 1: "And so the American Experiment Begins": The Constitution and the Three Branches of Government 1. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Future of Originalism, Richard Primus 2. Some Alexander Hamilton, but Not So Much Hamilton, in the New Supreme Court, John Q. Barrett 3. Tragedy in the Supreme Court: "I'd Rather Be Divisive Than Indecisive", Lisa A. Tucker 4. Alexander Hamilton's "One Shot" before the U.S. Supreme Court, Gregory G. Garre 5. "Never Gon' Be President Now", Michael Gerhardt 6. Hamilton: Child Laborer and Truant, Paul M. Secunda Part 2: "America, You Great Unfinished Symphony" 7. Hamilton's America—and Ours, Kermit Roosevelt III 8. Hamilton and Washington at War and a Vision for Federal Power, Elizabeth B. Wydra 9. Two Oaths: Supporting and Defending the Constitution with Hamilton, Jill I. Goldenziel Part 3: "We'll Never Be Truly Free": Hamilton and Race 10. Finding Constitutional Redemption through Hamilton, Christina Mulligan 11. Race, Nation, and Patrimony, or, the Stakes of Diversity in Hamilton, Anthony Paul Farley 12. "The World Turned Upside Down": Employment Discrimination, Race, and Authenticity in Hamilton, Marcia L. McCormick 13. Hamilton and the Power of Racial Fables in Examining the U.S. Constitution, Danielle Holley-Walker Part 4: "I'm 'a Compel Him to Include Women in the Sequel" 14. On Women's Rights, Legal Change, and Incomplete Sequels, Eloise Pasachoff 15. When Your Job Is to Marry Rich: Marriage as a Market in Hamilton, Kimberly Mutcherson 16. "Love" Triangles: Romance or Domestic Violence?, Rosa Frazier Part 5: "Immigrants, We Get the Job Done" 17. Hamilton's Dissent to the Travel Ban, Neal Katyal 18. Hamilton and the Limits of Contemporary Immigration Narratives, Anil Kalhan 19. Hamilton's Immigrant Story Today, Elizabeth Keyes Part 6: "The Ten Duel Commandments" 20. Hamilton, Hip-Hop, and the Culture of Dueling in America, Glenn Harlan Reynolds 21. Alexander Hamilton, Citizen-Protector?, Jody Madeira 22. We Will Never Be Satisfied: Hamilton and Jefferson's Duel Over Constitutional Meaning, Ian Millhiser 23. Hamilton, Burr, and Defamation: Physical versus Verbal Duels, Benjamin Barton 24. Elections as Duels: "You Know What? We Can Change That. You Know Why?" 'Cuz We Have the Support of Two-Thirds of Each House of Congress and Three-Quarters of the States!, Joshua A. Douglas 25. Modern-Day Protests: As American as Apple Pie, Kimberly Jade Norwood Part 7: "Who Tells Your Story?" 26. Every Action's an Act of Creation: Hamilton and Copyright Law, Rebecca Tushnet 27. Hollering to Be Heard: Copyright and the Aesthetics of Voice, Zahr K. Said 28. Taking Law School Musicals Seriously: A Little Love Letter to Legal Musicals and the Lawyers Who Love Them, Robin J. Effron 29. "The World Turned Upside Down": Hamilton and Deconstruction, Bret D. Asbury Part 8: "What Is a Legacy?": Lessons from Hamilton beyond the Libretto 30. "Cabinet Battle #1": The Structure of Federalism, Erwin Chemerinsky 31. Hamilton's Bank and Jefferson's Nightmare, Mehrsa Baradaran 32. Alexander Hamilton's Legacy: The American Board of Directors, M. Todd Henderson 33. I Never Thought I'd Live Past Twenty": Hamilton through the Lens of Anticipated Early Death, Sarah Fishel

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Book SynopsisWhile European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own. Trade Review"Elegantly and engagingly written, The Singing Turk is the first exhaustive and definitive investigation of the largely forgotten body of operas on Turkish themes. It is also an intellectual history of European identity as it variously rejected, resisted, flirted with, but never genuinely embraced Turkey and the Turks, with far-reaching present-day relevance." -- Maria Todorova * University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign *"Larry Wolff's book combines in the best way imaginable the study of history and of opera. I have never hummed and drummed as much when reading a book." -- Philipp Ther * University of Vienna *"This tome is a vigorous, literate and well-informed examination of the place of Ottoman- Turks in European operatic traditions that succeeds in making sense of a complicated, intricate and otherwise fragmented page in Western history. A remarkable feat, The Singing Turk is the first full account of a musicological phenomenon that, following centuries of conflict, underwent unprecedented changes to its fundamental intellectual roots following the defeat of the Ottoman army outside Vienna in 1683 and the transformation of their portrayal in popular culture across Christian Europe in the eighteenth century...It is likely to become the standard text on the subject for English- speaking readers, and can be warmly recommended to graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in opera, music, history and the dynamic tensions of Christian– Muslim relations." -- Abdullah Drury * Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations *"The Ottoman Empire, seen in stage characters called Turks, served as an important vehicle for musical theater during the last four hundred years. Larry Wolff has produced a remarkably wide-ranging survey that suggests how the characters, the settings, and the music reflect social and political contexts of the time. Knitting together the work of musicologists, historians, and political scientists, Wolff establishes what members of the public inferred about the evolution of the Ottoman Empire within international affairs from watching these shows." -- William Weber * American Historical Review *"Wolff has a gift for contextualizing his subject without being reductive. This quality enables him to historicize perceptions of Turkishness instead of seeing them simply as emanations of some static "Other." Although not a professional musicologist, he deserves praise for venturing into a field usually confined to specialists. Here his status as an outsider may well be an asset. His forays into the strictly musical dimensions of his subject are erudite and well-informed, but his lucid style is accessible to nonspecialists. The result is a book that general historians as well as music scholars will find rewarding." -- James Van Horn Melton * Journal of Modern History *"Engagingly written and judiciously illustrated, The Singing Turk follows the evolution of Ottoman themes in Italian, German, and French opera during the long eighteenth century (roughly 1680–1820)...This book is rich in cultural and historical detail that somehow never threatens to overwhelm the author's overall analysis, which engages not only with geopolitics but with Orientalism and the history of emotions." -- Jane Hathaway * Canadian Journal of History *"In this penetrating study, Larry Wolff suggests not only how operatic representations of Turkish themes and characters might have reflected transformations in perceptions of Ottoman power, but also how – as in, say, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, yet closer to 'home' – they enabled Enlightened criticism of European 'reality.'" -- Mark Berry * European History Quarterly *"As a general historian, Wolff can ignore the boundaries that generally surround—and defend—musical studies, and the result is refreshing, as well as confident in its command of musical terminology." -- Paul Griffiths * Times Literary Supplement *"[T]he brilliant idea of opening a website (www.singingturk.com) bringing together musical and operatic excerpts for every chapter with brief commentary about each clip raises the status of this work from an academic reading to an operatic experience on its own right."--Yasir Yılmaz, Austrian History Yearbook"Wolff combines history and music at an extraordinarily deep level and on a particularly large scale....[He shows] that the Singing Turk and associated figures, values, and musical elements had, indeed, played a paramount role in the construction of European identity, and that operatic stages had been primary venues for the articulation of that process....Never before has a study been able to illustrate this intricate process with such completeness and richness." -- Alessandra Palidda * H-France Review *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe introduction sets the problem of operatic representation in the context of the Triplex Confinium, the adjacency of the Ottoman, Venetian, and Habsburg states in the eighteenth century, creating circumstances of war and hostility, but also coexistence and familiarity. Venice and Vienna were significant both as capitals of the Triplex Confinium and as operatic centers for works on Turkish themes. Some familiarity and fascination with elements of Turkish musical style— Janissary or alla turca style— was one aspect of this geopolitical situation, and the introduction makes the case for thinking about musical issues in the context of international relations and the dynamics of war and peace. Finally, the introduction considers how the singing Turk on the operatic stage addressed issues of European identity in the age of Enlightenment, in matters of political theory, emotional discipline, and the presumption of civilization. 1The Captive Sultan: Operatic Transfigurations of the OttomanMenace after the Siege of Vienna chapter abstractThis chapter suggests that, following the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, a lessening of fear and anxiety in Europe coincided with the emergence of operas about Turks as European entertainment—even as Ottoman territorial recession was articulated in the treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718). The most important subject of such operas, initially, was Tamerlane's capture of Sultan Bajazet, with the sultan singing in captivity as the emblem of Ottoman defeat, engaging European sympathy rather than dread. Such operas appeared first in Venice and Hamburg in 1689 and 1690, and then found definitive form with the libretto by Agostino Piovene and music by Francesco Gasparini in Venice in 1711, revised for Reggio Emilia in 1719. The most celebrated such work was Handel's Tamerlano, in London in 1724, borrowing Gasparini's tenor Francesco Borosini for the role of Bajazet. Vivaldi also set the Piovene libretto as Bajazet in 1735. 2The Generous Turk: Captive Christians and Operatic Comedy in Paris chapter abstractThis chapter considers Paris as an operatic perspective on the Ottoman empire, conditioned both by the relative remoteness of Paris from Istanbul and the longterm French solidarity with the Ottomans against the Habsburgs. The Paris fairs of the early eighteenth century served as a matrix for the emergence of new musical comedies on Turkish themes, including the comical figure of Arlequin (Harlequin). The Ottoman embassy to Paris in 1720-1721 stimulated a fashionable cultural interest in Turquerie, while the publication of Montesquieu's Persian Letters in 1721 as a foundational work of the French Enlightenment encouraged a philosophical perspective on the Muslim world. These new attitudes received their most important and influential operatic expression in Rameau's Les Indes galantes of 1735, with one act titled Le Turc généreux. The "generous Turk" was a magnanimous and sympathetic pasha who ultimately emancipated a female European captive from his harem. 3The Triumphant Sultana: Suleiman and His Operatic Harem chapter abstractThis chapter presents the French musical comedy phenomenon of Charles-Simon Favart's The Three Sultanas (Les Trois Sultanes) of 1761, about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the favorite of his harem, Roxelana, as performed by Marie-Justine Favart. In this Parisian work the Ottoman sultan was triumphantly "civilized" by Roxelana, who was fictively imagined as a Frenchwoman in Suleiman's harem. The work was staged and costumed in the spirit of cultural Turquerie, and was politically meaningful in relation to the court of Louis XV and the influence and precedence of his mistress Madame Pompadour. There was also a roughly concurrent opera seria libretto concerning Suleiman, titled Solimano, and first composed by Johann Adolph Hasse for Dresden in 1753. Favart's Three Sultanas was translated, recomposed, and restaged all over Europe, including notable versions composed by Joseph Martin Kraus for Stockholm in 1789, and by Franz Xaver Süssmayr for Vienna in 1799. 4The Turkish Subjects of Gluck and Haydn: Comic Opera in War And Peace chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the 1760s and 1770s, especially in the Habsburg monarchy, as Gluck and Haydn began to compose comic operas on Turkish themes making use of Janissary percussion and alla turca style. Cultural interest in the Ottomans was conditioned by the presence of Ottoman envoys in Vienna in the age of Maria Theresa and, especially, by the international circumstances of the Russian-Turkish war of 1768 to 1774. Gluck's and Haydn's French and Italian versions of the same subject, Les Pèlerins de la Mecque and L'incontro improvviso, are discussed with reference to the comical figure of the Kalender. Haydn's comic opera Lo speziale, performed at Esterháza in 1768, is considered in relation to operatic Turkish travesty and disguise. The news of the ongoing war between the Turks and Russians created a climate encouraging for comic operas about Turks, including works by Niccolò Jommelli and Georg Joseph Vogler. 5Osmin in Vienna: Mozart's Abduction and the Centennial of the Ottoman Siege chapter abstractThis chapter discusses the creation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio in 1781 and 1782 in the context of the approaching centennial of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1783. Mozart turned from a serious Turkish subject in the unfinished opera Zaide to a comic Turkish subject in the Abduction, using alla turca musical style. In the Abduction the issue of Osmin's rage, his inability to master his emotions, was also relevant to Mozart's own recent conditions of service under Archbishop Colloredo in Salzburg. Singing in the deepest part of the basso range, Ludwig Fischer in the role of Osmin offered a representation of Turkish masculinity that removed all suspicion that Osmin, as overseer of the sultan's harem, might actually be a eunuch. In fact, eighteenth-century culture kept carefully distinct the dangerously related discourses concerning harem eunuchs, on the one hand, and operatic castrati, on the other. 6"To Honor the Emperor": Pasha Selim and Emperor Joseph Ii in the Age of Enlightened Absolutism chapter abstractThis chapter considers the political and emotional dynamics of Mozart's Sultan Soliman in Zaide, and then addresses the dramatic portrait of Pasha Selim in the Abduction as a very purposeful effort by the composer to bring himself to the attention of Habsburg Emperor Joseph II. Pasha Selim was made to appear as a model of Ottoman magnanimity which was intended to reflect upon the emperor in the audience at the first performance in 1782. The course of Josephine enlightened absolutism was closely correlated with Mozart's career in Vienna, and Mozart showed himself a dedicated Josephine with his musical attentions to Joseph's Turkish war of 1787. This chapter also considers the enormous and persistent success of Grétry's La Caravane du Caire as a French counterpart to the Abduction in the 1780s, with parallel political implications. The Ottoman accession of Sultan Selim III is discussed in relation to European enlightened absolutism. 7The Ottoman Adventures of Rossini and Napoleon: Kaimacacchi and Missipipi at La Scala chapter abstractThis chapter considers Napoleonic Europe as the context for the formation of the young Rossini as an opera composer, with particular attention to Napoleon's invasion of Ottoman Egypt, which coincided with the first Parisian production of Mozart's Abduction in 1798. There were new attentions to Ottoman themes in Napoleonic Paris during the first decade of the century, not only at the Paris Opéra, but also in musical comedies and burlesque satires. In 1812 Rossini brought his own brand of Turkishness to La Scala in Napoleonic Milan with La pietra del paragone and its immensely popular comical scene of Turkish disguise. Stendhal, as an ardent admirer of Rossini, hailed the composer as Napoleon's successor, making his very own musical conquest of Europe. 8Pappataci and Kaimakan: Reflections in a Mediterranean Mirror chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, considered as a Venetian triumph for Rossini in 1813, employing Turkish themes that resonated with Venetian-Ottoman history. The libretto by Angelo Anelli had been composed earlier by Luigi Mosca. Rossini's opera is considered in the context of Mediterranean piracy and captivity, and interpreted as an opera of conquest in which the heroine Isabella executes a successful European campaign against the Algerian Mustafa Bey— in some sense anticipating the French invasion of Algeria in 1830. The farce of reciprocal Ottoman-European honors— Pappataci and Kaimakan— is shown to reflect not the unbridgeable differences but rather the Mediterranean resemblances between the Napoleonic Italians and the Ottoman Algerians. Isabella's famous aria "Pensa alla patria" presented Italian patriotism within an Ottoman scenario. The basso Filippo Galli sang the role of Mustafa Bey, as he sang all of Rossini's leading Turkish roles. 9An Ottoman Prince in the Romantic Imagination: The Libertine Adventures of Rossini's Turkish Traveler chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the Romantic conception of the singing Turk in Rossini's Il Turco in Italia. After centuries of European warfare with the Ottomans, Rossini in 1814, working with the librettist Felice Romani, conjured a traveling Turkish protagonist who not only embraced the beauty of Italy and the Italians, but also exercised a musical charisma that made him the conqueror of hearts without resort to any weaponry at all. As the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy collapsed in 1814, Prince Selim, played by Filippo Galli, made his entrance at La Scala, singing a greeting to "Bella Italia"— which enabled Italians to see their own politically problematic peninsula reflected in the gaze of an admiring Turk. For the heroine Fiorilla the libertine Turk was irresistible, and Rossini's music suggested the transgressive compatibility between the Italian woman and the Turkish man who both made love in exactly the same Mediterranean way. 10Maometto in Naples and Venice: The Operatic Charisma of the Conqueror chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on Rossini's Maometto Secondo, presenting the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II, at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples in 1820. The sultan appeared as a charismatic and romantic singing Turk, performed by Filippo Galli. Enthusiasm for Rossini is discussed in the political context of Restoration Europe in the age of Metternich. Rossini's Maometto Secondo is analyzed in relation to Peter Winter's Maometto at La Scala in 1817, an opera about Mohammed the Prophet, based on Voltaire's tragedy Mahomet. Rossini's Maometto Secondo also conjured memories of Napoleon, the man whose seemingly endless ambitions for conquest were reflected in the operatic ambitions of Maometto on the operatic stage. Finally, since the plot of the opera deals with the sultan's specific conquest of Venetian Negroponte, Rossini's revision of the opera for Venice in 1822 is considered in relation to the long history of Venetian-Ottoman relations. 11Rossini's Siege of Paris: Ottoman Subjects in the French Restoration chapter abstractThis chapter considers the flourishing of operas on Turkish themes in Restoration France, including Rossini's Turkish operas in Paris— especially as Rossini became director of the Théâtre-Italien in the 1820s. His most important contribution to Turkishness in Paris was his refashioning of Maometto Secondo as Le Siège de Corinthe for the Paris Opéra in 1826, and this was powerfully shaped by the ongoing Greek War of Independence and the potency of French Philhellenism. The Venetians of Maometto Secondo were now made into Greeks, at war with the Ottomans, and the opera was thus made relevant to contemporary Greece. Public response to Rossinian orchestration suggested that what was once considered "Janissary" percussion was now being generally absorbed into the percussion section of the modern orchestra. In 1824 Beethoven allowed for the brief nostalgic appearance of a Janissary band playing a Turkish march in the score of the Ninth Symphony. 12The Decline and Disappearance of the Singing Turk: Ottoman Reform, the Eastern Question, and the European Operatic Repertory chapter abstractThis chapter considers European opera after Rossini and the waning presence of Turkish figures and themes in nineteenth-century opera. Ottoman reform under Mahmud II and Abdülmecid I (including the reform of Ottoman music, led by "Donizetti Pasha," the brother of the famous composer), brought about some cultural convergence with Europe. At the same time the modern Eastern Question transformed European-Ottoman relations into an unoperatic calculus of the balance of power, and introduced modern European colonialism in the Ottoman lands, beginning with the French seizure of Algeria in 1830. The presence of the singing Turk in the operatic repertory became less and less viable, as was notably apparent in the cases of Verdi's I Lombardi and Il Corsaro in the 1840s. The chapter concludes by observing subliminal traces of Turkishness in the modern operatic repertory without Turks and the lingering presence of Turkishness in ballet and operetta. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion argues that the singing Turk, beginning with the figure of Bajazet in captivity, participated in a discourse of absolute power and political abjection, exploring issues of sovereignty that were deeply relevant for European princes. The singing Turk could also reflect the magnanimity of princes across Europe, from Rameau in Paris in the 1730s to Mozart in Vienna in the 1780s, contributing musically to a discourse about enlightened absolutism as embodied in the figure of the Generous Turk. The musical expression of extreme emotions— especially rage, as in the case of Mozart's Osmin— was seen as closely related to the presumptions and frustrations of absolute power. The musical mastery of operatic emotions contributed to a discourse on the civilizing process, with Turkishness posing questions of civilization that were thoroughly relevant to Europe. The singing Turk must be understood and interpreted in the historical context of European-Ottoman relations.

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Book SynopsisThe Enlightenment remains widely associated with the rise of scientific progress and the loss of religious faith, a dual tendency that is thought to have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. In her wide-ranging and richly illustrated book, Tili Boon Cuillé questions the accuracy of this narrative by investigating the fate of the marvelous in the age of reason. Exploring the affinities between the natural sciences and the fine arts, Cuillé examines the representation of natural phenomena—whether harmonious or discordant—in natural history, painting, opera, and the novel from Buffon and Rameau to Ossian and Staël. She demonstrates that philosophical, artistic, and emotional responses to the "spectacle of nature" in eighteenth-century France included wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the "sentiment of divinity." These "passions of the soul," traditionally associated with religion and considered antithetical to enlightenment, were linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot's Encyclopédie and to contemporary theorizations of the sublime. As Cuillé reveals, the marvelous was not eradicated but instead preserved through the establishment and reform of major French cultural institutions dedicated to science, art, religion, and folklore that were designed to inform, enchant, and persuade. This book has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.Trade Review"Genuinely interdisciplinary and drawing on an astonishing range of sources, Divining Nature is a remarkable achievement. Tili Boon Cuillé demonstrates that enchantment and the sentiment of the divine lie at the heart of scientific and aesthetic debates in the eighteenth century and are in no way antithetical to the spirit of the Enlightenment." -- Joanna Stalnaker * Columbia University *"Overturning a number of critical and historical clichés about the Enlightenment's role in disenchanting the world, Tili Boon Cuillé recovers a bold and original vision of the continuing role that enchantment played in the Age of Reason in France." -- Göran Blix * Princeton University *"Divining Nature is laudably ambitious. In a moment of strident and sometimes caricatural critique of the Enlightenment as a bastion of whiteness, colonial violence, and epistemic imperialism, Divining Nature offers a more capacious, nuanced, and agile vision, one based on epistemological humility, the transcendence of personal, cultural, and conceptual boundaries, and the rooting of aesthetic pleasure in the sympathetic identification with the other." -- Ryan Whyte * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *"Tili Boon Cuillé's newest book, Divining Nature, is a truly valuable contribution to the state of French Enlightenment studies today, convincingly demonstrating what is becoming increasingly apparent: that this movement was neither a clean break with the past, nor a definitive rejection of religion and spirituality, nor a neat split between the sciences and the arts." -- Hanna Roman * H-France *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction: The Spectacle of Nature chapter abstractOpening with the Abbé Pluche's best selling Spectacle de la nature, the introduction distinguishes characterizations of nature as book, clock, and spectacle. Questioning lingering associations of the Enlightenment with disenchantment, it considers the fate of the marvelous in eighteenth-century France. Affective responses to nature's spectacle—traditionally associated with religion or religious fanaticism—including wonder, enthusiasm, and melancholy, were systematically linked to the faculties of reason, imagination, and memory that structured Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie. The introduction lays the groundwork for this study by surveying developments in Enlightenment science and aesthetics, particularly empiricism, sensationalism, vitalism, and the theorization of the sublime, traced not to Longinus but to Lucretius. 1The Marvels of Nature in Buffon and Rameau chapter abstractTaking Fontenelle's famed comparison of nature to the opera somewhat literally, Chapter 1 considers the representation of natural phenomena in the Comte de Buffon's Histoire naturelle and Jean-Philippe Rameau's opera Zoroastre, which coincided in 1749. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have argued that wonder gave way to a more scientific curiosity in the Enlightenment. This chapter demonstrates that Buffon and Rameau to the contrary sought to sustain the wonder of the reader/spectator when confronted with natural marvels on the page and the stage. Wonder constituted the affective counterpart to encounters with the marvelous, which Rameau's librettist Louis de Cahusac considered a defining feature of French tragic opera. The chapter likens plans for the improvement of special effects, the renovation of the opera, and the establishment of the National Museum of Natural History in the course of the century, designed to reconcile enlightenment and enchantment. 2The Philosophy of Nature in Diderot and Rousseau chapter abstractDenis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were avid readers of Buffon's Histoire naturelle and active participants in the quarrels prompted by Rameau's operas. To date, scholarship has focused primarily on their theorization of physiological and moral sensibility. Chapter 2 investigates Diderot's and Rousseau's response to the spectacle of nature, focusing on the affinity between the inspiration of the artist and the identification of the spectator. Jan Goldstein has characterized "enthusiasm" and "imagination" as eighteenth-century smear words. These terms are recuperated in Diderot's writings on painting and the theater and Rousseau's writings on opera and the novel, however. Enthusiasm, like pity, necessitates a movement outside oneself that facilitates union with the other and the forging of the ideal model. The chapter concludes by considering the alternate forms of natural spectacle that Diderot and Rousseau envision in their writings. 3The Harmony of Nature in Paul et Virginie chapter abstractRousseau's protégé, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, conceived of his Études de la nature as a complement to Buffon's Histoire naturelle. Chapter 3 traces the generation of his novel Paul et Virginie from his travelogue to its publication as the fourth book of his natural history. Bernard de Lacépède's Poétique de la musique provides a missing link between Bernardin's novel and its operatic adaptation by Jean-François Le Sueur. Reading Bernardin's natural history, full of advice for artists, alongside Le Sueur's essays on church music, full of tips for composers, reveals that author and composer both sustained and sought to foster mixed emotions in response to the spectacle of nature that led to the "sentiment of divinity." The chapter concludes with a consideration of French cathedrals, redesigned along lines reminiscent of the opera and the natural history museum in the course of the century. 4The Poetics of Nature in Ossian and Staël chapter abstractFrance's frame of reference shifted northward when James Macpherson went in search of the Scots national epic, returning with poems attributed to the third-century bard Ossian. Though denounced as a hoax, Macpherson's reconstruction of a lost epic from surviving fragments has since been compared to scientific endeavors such as geology and cartography. Chapter 4 explores Macpherson's use of similes interrelating the natural and the spiritual realms and the relationship between melancholy and memory in the epics before turning to their favorable French reception. Both Napoleon and Germaine de Staël embraced France's northern heritage, hailing Ossian as the new Homer. Privileging northern melancholy over southern enthusiasm, Staël looked to the philosophical poetry of the north as the source of French spiritual regeneration. Ironically, anxieties about the epics' authenticity led to the establishment of the Académie Celtique and the science of folklore. Epilogue: A Theater of Enchantment chapter abstractThe epilogue considers E.T.A. Hoffmann and François-René de Chateaubriand's retrospective reflections on the marvelous in art and nature. Evidence that the marvelous survived the century can be found in the glories used to transport Greek gods, Christian angels, and Scots ghosts in opera, on altarpieces, and in history painting. The cognitive and emotional responses to the spectacle of nature, including wonder, enthusiasm, melancholy, and the "sentiment of divinity," which contributed to the theorization of the sublime, also pertain to current discussions of environmental aesthetics. chapter abstract

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Book SynopsisA beguiling exploration of the last Habsburg monarchs' grip on Europe's historical and cultural imagination. In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters; meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War. By her death in 1989, she had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century, and our contemporary relationship to it.Trade Review"In Larry Wolff's brilliant telling, an opera's fairy-tale empress and a real-life Habsburg empress come to embody the phantom political culture of an empire that to this day maintains a powerful hold over Central and Eastern European institutions and imagination."—Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History"This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages."—Leon Botstein, Bard College"Larry Wolff's dual biography of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's fictional empress (The Woman without a Shadow, premiered in 1919) and the last Habsburg empress Zita, who lived until 1989, is a silver rose of a book—a brilliant account of an imperfect operatic masterpiece, its allegorical investments, and its call for the repopulation and humanization of Europe in the wake of World War I."—Michael P. Steinberg, author of The Afterlife of MosesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pulling Roots 1. Giving Language Time 2. The Transported Word: Wheatley's Part 3. Voices of the Ground: Blake's Language in Deep Time 4. Radical Diversions: Wordsworth's Overgrowth 5. The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild Conclusion: Deracination

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Book SynopsisIn Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience. Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theater director, uses the embodied "I" as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking "I" and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and — more broadly — academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the "I" on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it.Trade Review"Beautifully argued and judiciously organized, Malicious Deceivers moves seamlessly from philosophical exegesis to haunting personal reflection to elegant close readings. This book makes an exciting and critical intervention in philosophy, media studies, performance studies, and critical internet studies."—Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY"Expertly synthesizing debates shared by philosophy, performance studies, and media theory, Malicious Deceivers advances a provocative reframing of the age-old problem of simulation. Jucan offers new insight into a contemporary era profoundly shaped by the anxieties and challenges of separating true from false, real from fake, human from machine—from the ethics of AI to the 'post-truth' media environment."—Anna Watkins Fisher, University of MichiganTable of ContentsPrologue: Beginning Philosophy 1. Enter the Malicious Deceiver 2. (Dis)simulating Thinking Machines Interlude: Auto-History 3. Synthetica: (Un)picturing Plastic Worlds 4. On Circulation: Virality and Internet Performances Epilogue: Notes Toward a Living Practice

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Book SynopsisA beguiling exploration of the last Habsburg monarchs' grip on Europe's historical and cultural imagination. In 1919 the last Habsburg rulers, Emperor Karl and Empress Zita, left Austria, going into exile. That same year, the fairy-tale opera Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), featuring a mythological emperor and empress, premiered at the Vienna Opera. Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and German composer Richard Strauss created Die Frau ohne Schatten through the bitter years of World War I, imagining it would triumphantly appear after the victory of the German and Habsburg empires. Instead, the premiere came in the aftermath of catastrophic defeat. The Shadow of the Empress: Fairy-Tale Opera and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy explores how the changing circumstances of politics and society transformed their opera and its cultural meanings before, during, and after the First World War. Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned emperors and empresses into fantastic fairy-tale characters; meanwhile, following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy after the war, their real-life counterparts, removed from political life in Europe, began to be regarded as anachronistic, semi-mythological figures. Reflecting on the seismic cultural shifts that rocked post-imperial Europe, Larry Wolff follows the story of Karl and Zita after the loss of their thrones. Karl died in 1922, but Zita lived through the rise of Nazism, World War II, and the Cold War. By her death in 1989, she had herself become a fairy-tale figure, a totem of imperial nostalgia. Wolff weaves together the story of the opera's composition and performance; the end of the Habsburg monarchy; and his own family's life in and exile from Central Europe, providing a rich new understanding of Europe's cataclysmic twentieth century, and our contemporary relationship to it.Trade Review"In Larry Wolff's brilliant telling, an opera's fairy-tale empress and a real-life Habsburg empress come to embody the phantom political culture of an empire that to this day maintains a powerful hold over Central and Eastern European institutions and imagination."—Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History"This alluring and original work of history explores the parallel lives of a twentieth century opera, the twilight of the Habsburg Empire, and its last emperor and empress. Politics is woven into the opera's creation and its later life. In this brilliant book, art imitates life, and life art, through mirror images, shadows and the unexpected destinies of historic personages."—Leon Botstein, Bard College"Larry Wolff's dual biography of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's fictional empress (The Woman without a Shadow, premiered in 1919) and the last Habsburg empress Zita, who lived until 1989, is a silver rose of a book—a brilliant account of an imperfect operatic masterpiece, its allegorical investments, and its call for the repopulation and humanization of Europe in the wake of World War I."—Michael P. Steinberg, author of The Afterlife of MosesTable of ContentsIntroduction: Pulling Roots 1. Giving Language Time 2. The Transported Word: Wheatley's Part 3. Voices of the Ground: Blake's Language in Deep Time 4. Radical Diversions: Wordsworth's Overgrowth 5. The Primitive Today: Thoreau in the Wild Conclusion: Deracination

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Book SynopsisIn Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience. Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theater director, uses the embodied "I" as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking "I" and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and — more broadly — academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the "I" on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it.Trade Review"Beautifully argued and judiciously organized, Malicious Deceivers moves seamlessly from philosophical exegesis to haunting personal reflection to elegant close readings. This book makes an exciting and critical intervention in philosophy, media studies, performance studies, and critical internet studies."—Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College, CUNY"Expertly synthesizing debates shared by philosophy, performance studies, and media theory, Malicious Deceivers advances a provocative reframing of the age-old problem of simulation. Jucan offers new insight into a contemporary era profoundly shaped by the anxieties and challenges of separating true from false, real from fake, human from machine—from the ethics of AI to the 'post-truth' media environment."—Anna Watkins Fisher, University of MichiganTable of ContentsPrologue: Beginning Philosophy 1. Enter the Malicious Deceiver 2. (Dis)simulating Thinking Machines Interlude: Auto-History 3. Synthetica: (Un)picturing Plastic Worlds 4. On Circulation: Virality and Internet Performances Epilogue: Notes Toward a Living Practice

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Book SynopsisScripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques—black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)—in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.Trade Review"It’s not every day that you read a text that reshapes its field in extraordinary ways while opening exciting perspectives to adjacent fields of study; not every day that you read a document that you know, page after page, will be central for generations to come. Scripts of Blackness is a rigorous, interactive, beautifully-written and generous text that takes from pasts (largely understudied or unknown) to speak of and dialogue with our presents, in order to open windows to multiple futures...Scripts of Blackness is an extraordinary gift for scholars of race in contemporary France. It shines a light on the national and trans-European forges that produced the iron masks currently constraining Afro-French. The book is an exceptional tool for us and for generations to come, in our effort to indigenize and define blackness in French." * H-France *"[A] groundbreaking investigation into three modes of racialization—cosmetic, acoustic, and kinetic—that were produced in the theaters of Spain, France, and England across two centuries. The book enriches existing studies of race and performance by departing from the conventional focus on a single nation and limited period and instead highlighting the correspondences between the racial paradigms produced in these countries...[E]ssential reading for students and scholars of early modern studies." * Shakespeare Bulletin *"[R]ich [and] thought-provoking...This important book issues a compelling call to reassess early modern European performances of blackness in the harsh light of their effects on Afro-descendant subjects." * Journal 18 *"This is the first study to my knowledge that puts English, French, and Spanish early modern literatures in conversation with each other through a comparatist method that discusses the history of the African diaspora in each country’s colonial development. Noémie Ndiaye’s scholarship is the soundest I have seen on the topic of early modern race theory." * Baltasar Fra-Molinero, Bates College *"Studies of blackface performance in the early modern world have focused mostly on English plays, masques, and pageants. As Noémie Ndiaye convincingly demonstrates, those performances did not exist in isolation, and the early modern formation of blackness as a racial category was a transnational European endeavor. Scripts of Blackness is original in that it goes beyond the cosmetics and prosthetics of blackface to consider the ways black characters were made to speak and to move." * Virginia Mason Vaughan, Clark University *Table of ContentsContents Introduction. Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe Chapter 1. A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness and Religion Chapter 2. A Brief Herstory of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality Chapter 3. Blackspeak: Acoustic Blackness and the Accents of Race Chapter 4. Black Moves: Race, Dance, and Power Post/Script. Ecologies of Racial Performance Appendix. Selection of Early Modern Plays Featuring Black Characters Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

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Book SynopsisBad Blood explores representations of race in early modern English and Spanish literature, especially drama. It addresses two different forms of racial ideology: one concerned with racialized religious difference—that is, the notion of having Jewish or Muslim “blood”—and one concerned with Blackness and whiteness. Shakespeare’s Othello tells us that he was “sold to slavery” in his youth, a phrase that evokes the Atlantic triangle trade for readers today. For many years, however, scholars have asserted that racialized slavery was not yet widely understood in early modern England, and that the kind of enslavement that Othello describes is related to Christian-Muslim conflict in the Mediterranean rather than the rise of the racialized enslavement of Afro-diasporic subjects. Bad Blood offers a new account of early modern race by tracing the development of European racial vocabularies from Spain to England. Dispelling assumptions, stemming from Spain’s historical exclusion of Jews and Muslims, that premodern racial ideology focused on religious difference and purity of blood more than color, Emily Weissbourd argues that the context of the Atlantic slave trade is indispensable to understanding race in early modern Spanish and English literature alike. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and their contemporaries, as well as Spanish picaresque fiction and its English translations, Weissbourd reveals how ideologies of racialized slavery as well as religious difference come to England via Spain, and how both notions of race operate in conjunction to shore up fantasies of Blackness, whiteness, and “pure blood.” The enslavement of Black Africans, Weissbourd shows, is inextricable from the staging of race in early modern literature.Trade Review"Essential, bracing, inspiring reading, brimming with fresh and surprising insights and groundbreaking discoveries, many hiding in plain sight but—like whiteness itself—long rendered invisible, requiring a comparative, transnational approach to race studies and the rigor, shrewdness, measure, and skepticism of Emily Weissbourd to reveal them." * Robert B. Hornback, Oglethorpe University *"Bad Blood provides the first meaningful analysis of how literary presentations of blood purity and blackness in Spain were mistranslated in an English context. Emily Weissbourd exhibits an impressive breadth and depth in her engagement with primary and secondary sources." * Christina H. Lee, Princeton University *

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Book SynopsisIn Corrosive Solace, Daniel O’Quinn argues that the loss of the American colonies instantiated a complex reorganization in sociability and politics in the British metropole that has had long-lasting effects on British national and imperial culture, which can be seen and analyzed within its performative repertoire. He examines how the analysis of feeling or affect can be deployed to address the inchoate causal relation between historical events and their mediation. In this sense, Corrosive Solace’s goals are twofold: first, to outline the methodologies necessary for dealing with the affective recognition of historical crisis; and second, to make the historically familiar strange again, and thus make visible key avenues for discussion that have remained dormant. Both of these objectives turn on recognition: How do we theorize the implicit affective recognition of crisis in a distant historical moment? And how do we recognize what we, in our present moment, cannot discern? Corrosive Solace addresses this complex cultural reorientation by attending less to “new” cultural products than to the theoretical and historical problems posed by looking at the transformation of “old” plays and modes of performance. These “old” plays—Shakespeare, post-Restoration comedy and she-tragedy—were a vital plank of the cultural patrimony, so much of O’Quinn’s analysis lies in how tradition was recovered and redirected to meet urgent social and political needs. Across the arc of Corrosive Solace, he tracks how the loss of the American War forced Britons to refashion the repertoire of cultural signs and social dispositions that had subtended its first empire in the Atlantic world in a way more suited to its emergent empire in South Asia.Trade Review"The significance of O’Quinn’s argument is its ability to link the everyday and the personal with the social, the political, and the cultural. At the level of both form and content, O’Quinn attempts to understand the implications and potentialities of affective recognitions, aesthetic mediations, formal transformations, and generic innovations in all their urgency and topicality, as a response to a cultural need to adapt to a period of turbulent transition instigated by historical crises. The argument progresses from issues of embodiment to questions of consciousness to transformations in processes of socialization to explain the emergence of systemic norms. It effectively reconciles phenomenological investigations with structuralist manifestations, offering a forensic cultural analysis of affect and affective sociability. " * Studies in Romaticism *"Corrosive Solace represents an authoritative statement on the importance of the theatre to what Daniel O’Quinn characterizes as the ‘post-American condition,’ i.e., how society, politics, and culture in Britain dealt with the loss of the American colonies and within a few short years, a new imperial dispensation, looking toward India and the threat of Napoleon in Europe. The book traces in fine detail ‘what it feels like’ to experience the pressure of historical change without being able to articulate or fully encompass what that change means. It is thoroughly and admirably interdisciplinary, seamlessly integrating approaches from theatre history, performance studies, cultural studies, affect theory, and social and political history to produce concentrated but still lucid readings of a number of key texts, performers, and events. Together these readings make for a new history of the 1780s and 1790s, especially in relation to the history of the broader politico-cultural role of the patent theatres, that will radically alter how we view these crucial decades." * —Gillian Russell, University of York *

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Book SynopsisHow early modern theatrical practice helped construct the category of "pagan" as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition In Making Pagans, John Kuhn argues that drama played a powerful role in the articulation of religious difference in the seventeenth century. Tracing connections between the history of stagecraft and ethnological disciplines such as ethnography, antiquarianism, and early comparative religious writing, Kuhn shows how early modern repertory systems that leaned heavily on thrift and reuse produced an enduring theatrical vocabulary for understanding religious difference through the representation of paganisma key term in the new taxonomy of world religions emerging at this time, and a frequent subject and motif in English drama of the era. Combining properties such as triumphal chariots, trick altars, and moving statues with music, special effects, and other elements, the spectacular set-pieces that were mostly developed for plays set in antiquity, depicting England's pre-Christian past, were frequently repurposed in new plays, in representations of Native Americans and Africans in colonial contact zones. Kuhn argues that the recycling of these set-pieces encouraged audiences to process new cultural sites through the lens of old performance tropes, and helped produce fictitious, quasi-ethnographic knowledge for spectators, generating the idea of a homogeneous, trans-historical, trans-geographical "paganism." Examining the common scenes of pagan ritual that filled England's seventeenth-century stagesmagical conjurations, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicidesKuhn traces these tropes across dozens of plays, from a range of authors including Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, John Dryden, and Philip Massinger. Drawing together theater history, Atlantic studies, and the history of comparative religion, Making Pagans reconceptualizes the material and iterative practices of the theater as central to the construction of radical religious difference in early modernity and of the category of paganism as a tool of European self-definition and colonial ambition.

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Book SynopsisScripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism.In this book, Noémie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniquesblack-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constitut

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Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene Since its first staging in 2016, Estado Vegetal, Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art, has expanded philosophical thinking into a fully-fledged artistic inquiry of nonanthropocentric being. Through Infante’s polyvocal monologue, acted with impetus by Marcela Salinas, plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world in the face of incommensurable trauma and loss. This first book dedicated to Infante’s plant-focused performance features eight essays by scholars, poets, and artists whose practices draw from research fields as disparate as new materialism, anthropogenic feminism, queer studies, and speculative realism. Including an interview with Infante, the full playscript, and stills from the performance, Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking reveals the roles that plants in art can play in productively reconfiguring human–nonhuman relations within current anthropogenic perspectives. Infante’s performance is a perfect case study and reference point for anyone interested in exploring the complexities of plant-thinking through alternative and experimental avenues. Furthermore, this book is at once a critical plant studies primer and an artistic problematization of the philosophical questions that have been central to the latest multidisciplinary discussions on plant-being. Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Utrecht U; Lucy Cotter, Portland State U; Prudence Gibson, UNSW Sydney; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country; Dawn Sanders, U of Gothenburg; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, colectivo LASTESIS; Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Table of Contents Introduction Giovanni Aloi The Right of the Other: Interpretation in Four Acts Michael Marder Thinking in the World: Estado Vegetal as Thought-Apparatus Maaike Bleeker Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge Lucy Cotter Vegetal Mythologies: Potted Plants and Storymaking Giovanni Aloi Attending to “Plantness” in Estado Vegetal Dawn Sanders “I Can’t Move”: Plants and the Politics of Mobility in Estado Vegetal Catriona Sandilands and Prudence Gibson Feminist Structures: Polyphonic Networks Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem Soledad: After Estado Vegetal Mandy-Suzanne Wong In Conversation Manuela Infante and Giovanni Aloi Estado Vegetal Manuela Infante with Marcela Salinas Acknowledgments Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene Since its first staging in 2016, Estado Vegetal, Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art, has expanded philosophical thinking into a fully-fledged artistic inquiry of nonanthropocentric being. Through Infante’s polyvocal monologue, acted with impetus by Marcela Salinas, plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world in the face of incommensurable trauma and loss. This first book dedicated to Infante’s plant-focused performance features eight essays by scholars, poets, and artists whose practices draw from research fields as disparate as new materialism, anthropogenic feminism, queer studies, and speculative realism. Including an interview with Infante, the full playscript, and stills from the performance, Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking reveals the roles that plants in art can play in productively reconfiguring human–nonhuman relations within current anthropogenic perspectives. Infante’s performance is a perfect case study and reference point for anyone interested in exploring the complexities of plant-thinking through alternative and experimental avenues. Furthermore, this book is at once a critical plant studies primer and an artistic problematization of the philosophical questions that have been central to the latest multidisciplinary discussions on plant-being. Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Utrecht U; Lucy Cotter, Portland State U; Prudence Gibson, UNSW Sydney; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country; Dawn Sanders, U of Gothenburg; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, colectivo LASTESIS; Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Table of Contents Introduction Giovanni Aloi The Right of the Other: Interpretation in Four Acts Michael Marder Thinking in the World: Estado Vegetal as Thought-Apparatus Maaike Bleeker Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge Lucy Cotter Vegetal Mythologies: Potted Plants and Storymaking Giovanni Aloi Attending to “Plantness” in Estado Vegetal Dawn Sanders “I Can’t Move”: Plants and the Politics of Mobility in Estado Vegetal Catriona Sandilands and Prudence Gibson Feminist Structures: Polyphonic Networks Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem Soledad: After Estado Vegetal Mandy-Suzanne Wong In Conversation Manuela Infante and Giovanni Aloi Estado Vegetal Manuela Infante with Marcela Salinas Acknowledgments Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisQueer exceptions is a study of contemporary solo performance in the UK and Western Europe that explores the contentious relationship between identity, individuality and neoliberalism. With diverse case studies featuring the work of La Ribot, David Hoyle, Oreet Ashery, Bridget Christie, Tanja Ostojic, Adrian Howells and Nassim Soleimanpour, the book examines the role of singular or ‘exceptional’ subjects in constructing and challenging assumed notions of communal sociability and togetherness, while drawing fresh insight from the fields of sociology, gender studies and political philosophy to reconsider theatre’s attachment to singular lives and experiences. Framed by a detailed exploration of arts festivals as encapsulating the material, entrepreneurial circumstances of contemporary performance-making, this is the first major critical study of solo work since the millennium.Trade Review‘Rising to the promise that the title holds out, this excellent book will be of value to all scholars with an interest in contemporary performance practices. It gives deep and well-informed insight into not only the creation and presentation of solo performance work but the economic realities within which it is embedded […]Greer’s palette is broad and wide-ranging, though this not in any way at the expense of detail – far from it. This brilliant addition to scholarly considerations of contemporary theatre practices is deeply rooted in an insider’s understanding of the logistics, economics, and sheer hard work that underpins solo performance.’Alison Jeffers, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2019)'This wide-ranging, brilliant, and scholarly volume adds a much-needed perspective on and assessment of queer solo performance: one that does not simply venerate it as identity validation nor dismiss it as a tool of neoliberal identity consumption, but that instead articulates how the works analysed offer twenty-first-century radical performance politics looking at, out, through, and beyond the performance of ‘the singular subject in neoliberal times’'Contemporary Theatre Review'Through an examination of contemporary European solo performance, Stephen Greer explores the form’s simultaneous resistance to and compatibility within neoliberalism.'The Drama Review'Queer Exceptions... catalogues a breadth of innovative performance practices, making it a valuable read for contemporary performance scholars. The application of a figural approach further offers a provocation to scholars across the discipline to reconsider ways in which we hold performance practices together.'Theatre Research International -- .Table of ContentsList of figuresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1. Locating solo performance 2. The martyr: dramaturgies of endurance, exhaustion and confession 3. The pariah: queer outcasts and the politics of wounded attachment 4. The killjoy: public unhappiness and theatrical scapegoats 5. The stranger: performing ‘out-of-placeness’ in the UK and Europe 6. The misfit: illness, disability and ‘improper’ subjects 7. The optimist: alternatives to neoliberalism in the here and now Conclusion ReferencesIndex

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