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Media type:
E-Book
Title:
The Orient of the Boulevards
:
Exoticism, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century French Theater
Contains:
Frontmatter -- -- Contents -- -- Illustrations -- -- Introduction: From the Orient as Theater to the Orient in the Theater -- -- Part I. Domestic Exoticism -- -- Domestic Exoticism -- -- 1. Nineteenth-Century Popular Theater: Institutions and Practices -- -- 2. Exotic Tragedy: The Orient on the Ancien Régime Stage -- -- 3. Exotic Boundaries: Reading the Censors -- -- 4. Oriental Escapades: Les Ruines de Babylone, or Positioning the European Spectator -- -- Part II. Dramatic Campaigns -- -- Dramatic Campaigns -- -- 5. National Images: From La Bataille d'Aboukir to Bonaparte en Egypte, or The Evolution of National Drama -- -- 6. Fictions of War: Reading the Critics -- -- 7. Oriental Campaigns in Print and on Stage -- -- 8. Occident versus Orient: Les Massacres de Syrie and the Recasting of History -- -- Conclusion: From Stage to Screen -- -- Notes -- -- Bibliography -- -- Acknowledgments -- -- Index
Description:
The author draws upon the methodologies of theater and cultural studies to examine the construction of "the Orient" on the Parisian stage during the nineteenth century, the period of France's first imperial expansions into North Africa and the Middle East.As an increasingly large segment of the French population moved into contact with the Middle East and North Africa as soldiers, colonial administrators, settlers, and merchants, the balance between fantasy and immediacy in Orientalized drama shifted. The domestic melodrama gave way to elaborately staged military spectacles based on current events. Performed before working-class audiences, many of whose members were to be called up for military service, these spectacles bore explicit political and imperial agendas.Mining rich archival resources of play-texts, censorship reports, critical reviews, and contemporary writings on performance practice, this book reveals the complex processes by which the institutions of popular culture helped shape nineteenth-century notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality.