October
2007
New Publication - Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France. Stages and Histories, 1553-17970
Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France. Stages and Histories, 1553-1797
Amy Wygant
Published by Ashgate Publishing
217 pages, hardback, $99.95/ £50.00
ISBN 978-0-7546-5924-2
Synopsis: This study shows how the glamour of the historical witch, a spell she cast, was set on course, over a span of almost three hundred years, to become a generally broadcast glamour of appearance. The antique heroine Medea, revived on the stage of modernity by La Péruse, Corneille, and the operatic composer Cherubini, is the vehicle of this development.
Psychoanalytic thought about the behaviour of casual groups constituted by ephemeral events is brought to bear on the question of “what happened” when the early modern witch was staged. But the illusion generated by the witch is fundamentally demonic and only secondarily theatrical, and this study defines the link between the witch and the stage with an analysis of the little-read early demonology treatises of the two major theatrical theorists of the French seventeenth-century stage.
The study concludes with an analysis of Diderot’s claim that the historical process itself is magical, and with the moment in Revolutionary France when the slight and fragile body of the golden-throated singer, Julie-Angélique Scio, became a Medea for modernity.
Contents:
Introduction: Stages and Histories
1. Glamour and its Discontents
2. Medean Renaissance
3. Of Glammatology
4. The Question of Illusion
5. Narcissus, and the Devils of Loudun
6. The Magic of Modernity
Postscript
Bibliography
Index
