Overview

Tragedy Walks the Streets challenges the conventional understanding that the evolution of European drama effectively came to a halt during France's Revolutionary era. In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development. Drawing on a wide range of texts and images, he demonstrates how the social and political enlistment of dramatic theatricality inflected rising social and political tensions in pre-Revolutionary France, shaped French Revolutionary political culture, conditioned British political and cultural responses to the Revolution, and served as the impetus for Buchner's radical formal innovations of the 1830s. Setting aside traditional boundaries of literary scholarship, Buckley pursues instead a history of dramatic form that encompasses the full range of dramatic activity in the changing cultural life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including art, architecture, journalism, political performance, and social behavior. Surveying this expanded field of inquiry, Buckley weaves together a coherent formal genealogy of the drama during this period and offers a new, more continuous generic history of modern drama in its first and most turbulent phase of development.

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9780801884344

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Reviews

Compelling account of the birth of modern drama and its relationship with the French Revolution... Redraws the boundaries of scholarly insight and represents a valuable contribution to the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies. -- Radosveta Getova, Modern Language Review

The book is both interdisciplinary and highly readable. Choice 2007 Those working on British Romanticism are often monolingual and indeed monocultural and so it is refreshing to see a monograph engaging with France, Britain and Germany in its re-evaluation of the development of modern drama. -- Katherine Astbury French History 2007 Compelling account of the birth of modern drama and its relationship with the French Revolution... Redraws the boundaries of scholarly insight and represents a valuable contribution to the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies. -- Radosveta Getova Modern Language Review 2008 A thought-provoking and intellectually ambitious study. -- Mark Darlow Journal of European Studies 2008 Disciplined and concise with its scope and material, and in this way, it serves as a model for interdisciplinary rigor. -- Wendy C. Nielsen Modern Philology 2010

Author Information

Matthew S. Buckley is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University.

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