{"product_id":"terror-and-pity-aleksandr-sumarokov-and-the-theater-of-power-in-elizabethan-russia-9781618114723","title":"Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSituated on the intersection of comparative literary criticism, political history and theory, and cultural analysis, \u003cem\u003eTerror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia\u003c\/em\u003e offers an in-depth reading of early Russian tragedy as a political genre.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImported to Russia by Aleksandr Sumarokov around 1750, tragedy reenacted and shaped the symbolic economy and the often disturbing historical experience of “absolutist” autocracy. Addressing half-forgotten texts and events, this study engages with literary and cultural theory from Walter Benjamin to Foucault and “new historicism” in order to contribute to a broader discussion of early modern “poetics of culture.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kirill Ospovat’s \u003ci\u003eTerror and Pity\u003c\/i\u003e is the most important work on Russian Elizabethan literature since the publication in 1936 of Grigorii Gukovsky’s path-breaking book on the noble fronde. The book analyses Sumarokov’s tragedies through the perspectives of Russian court politics, European political thought of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and modern political theory. This approach not only gives new life to the plays that did not look particularly engaging for a long time, but also allows to reinterpret the phenomenon of court theater and Russian eighteenth-century cultural history.” -- Andrei Zorin, Professor of Russian, University of Oxford\u003cbr\u003e\"The book advances an important claim for eighteenth-century Russian drama. In this study, tragedy, and perhaps even Russian literature of the period more generally, emerges as not merely borrowing from European models, but instantiating and fully participating in the political and literary dynamics broadly characteristic of early modern European court culture. \u003ci\u003eTerror and Pity\u003c\/i\u003e identifies and skillfully explicates the affective mechanisms that articulated power relationships for the elite theater audiences at the court of Elizaveta Petrovna. Ospovat’s case studies – Alexander Sumarokov’s two early tragedies \u003ci\u003eKhorev\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eGamlet\u003c\/i\u003e – are aptly chosen to capture the Russian tragedic imagination at its very inception and to illustrate the book’s key argument: that in the absence of a full-fledged or fully permissible political theory, court theater came to perform the conceptual structures underwriting autocratic rule. Yet another of Ospovat’s signal achievements is the book’s thought-provoking engagement with the early modern theory of drama and politics in circulation in mid-18th century Russia; the influential twentieth-century writings of Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias, and Carl Schmitt, as well as a rich array of recent scholarship on Russian history, European neoclassical tragedy, Shakespeare, and early modern court politics.” -- Luba Golburt, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of California, Berkeley\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Introduction\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e PART I\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e POLITICAL THEATER AND THE ORIGINS OF RUSSIAN TRAGIC DRAMA\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Theater at Court\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Sumarokov and the \u003ci\u003eréformation du theater\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Political Theater and the Poetics of Autocracy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e “Scenarios of Power”: The Politics of Tragic Plots\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Dramatic Experience: Tragedy and the Emotional Economy of the Court\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e PART II\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e KHOREV, OR THE TRAGEDY OF ORIGIN\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Poetry, History, Allegory\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Khorev and the Scenario of Marriage\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Pastoral Politics and Tragedy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The Tragedy of Suspicion\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e PART III\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e POETIC JUSTICE: COUP D’ÉTAT, POLITICAL THEOLOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF SPECTACLE IN THE RUSSIAN \u003ci\u003eHAMLET\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Tragedy and Political Theology\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The Drama of Coup d’état \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Anatomy of Melancholy, or Gamlet the Hero\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Investigations of Malice\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e The Catharsis of Pardon\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e EPILOGUE\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e THE THEATER OF WAR AND PEACE: THE “MIRACLE OF THE HOUSE OF BRANDENBURG” AND THE POETICS OF EUROPEAN ABSOLUTISM\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Tragedy and Political Theology on the Battlefield\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Frederick, or the Performance of Defeat\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Peter, or the Tragedy of Triumph\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Conclusion: Tragedy, History, and Theory\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Bibliography\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Academic Studies Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51359750521175,"sku":"9781618114723","price":66.29,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781618114723.jpg?v=1754125601","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/terror-and-pity-aleksandr-sumarokov-and-the-theater-of-power-in-elizabethan-russia-9781618114723","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}