Excerpts and full text of articles and essays providing critical discussion of authors and their works.
- Children’s Literature Review
- Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism
- Contemporary Literary Criticism
- Dictionary of Literary Biography
- Drama Criticism
- Literature Criticism 1400-1800
- Nineteenth Century Literary Criticism
- Poetry Criticism
- Shakespearean Criticism (see index information)
- Short Story Criticism
- Something About the Authors
- Twentieth Century Literary Criticism
Critical analyses and brief plot summaries of the most studied works in the history of literature: long fiction, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
- Censorship
- Critical Survey of Drama
- Critical Survey of Long Fiction
- Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction
- Critical Survey of Poetry
- Critical Survey of Short Fiction
- Cyclopedia of Literary Characters
- Cyclopedia of Literary Places
- Cyclopedia of World Authors
- Dictionary of World Biography (The Ancient World, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, The 17th & 18th Centuries, The 19th Century, The 20th Century)
- Encyclopedia of the Ancient World
- Ethics
- Guide to Literary Masters & Their Works
- Identities & Issues in Literature
- Magill's Book Reviews
- Magill's Choice: Holocaust Literature
- Magill's Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature
- Magill's History Annual, 1983-1985
- Magill's Literary Annuals, 1977+
- Magill's Survey of American Literature
- Magill's Survey of World Literature
- Masterplots
- Masterplots II: African American Literature
- Masterplots II: American Fiction
- Masterplots II: British & Commonwealth Fiction
- Masterplots II: Christian Literature
- Masterplots II: Drama
- Masterplots II: European Fiction
- Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Biography
- Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Fiction
- Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature
- Masterplots II: Nonfiction
- Masterplots II: Poetry
- Masterplots II: Short Story
- Masterplots II: Women's Literature
- Masterplots II: World Fiction
- Sixties in America
Call Number: UCF ONLINE General Collection -- PN2637 .S53 2010
"Focusing on actresses in France during the early modern period, Virginia Scott examines how the stereotype of the actress has been constructed. The study then moves beyond that stereotype to detail the reality of the personal and artistic lives of women on the French stage, from the almost unknown Marie Ferré - who signed a contract for 12 livres a year in 1545 to perform the 'antiquailles de Rome or other histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics' in the provinces - to the queens of the eighteenth-century Paris stage, whose 'adventures' have overshadowed their artistic triumphs. The book also investigates the ways in which actresses made invaluable contributions to the development of the French theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and looks at the 'afterlives' of such women as Armande Béjart, Marquise Du Parc, Charlotte Desmares, Adrienne Lecouvreur, and Hippolyte Clairon in biographies, plays, and films."
The Theatre and Its Critics in Seventeenth-Century France by Henry Phillips
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- PN2049 .P55 1980
French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, 1550-1789
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- PN2621 .F73 1997
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This book covers the period which saw the establishment in France of a centralized official theatre - not only the Comédie-Française (the first 'national' theatre), but an Italian theatre and a state opera; the often subversive independent theatres are also discussed. Nearly 1,000 documents deal with censorship and other aspects of external control, company management, the acting profession, dramatic theory and criticism, theatre architecture, settings and costumes, audience composition and behaviour. Over 120 pictorial documents - architectural drawings, technical engravings, frontispieces, portraits, etc. - provide a visual dimension where relevant. A full linking narrative and a copious bibliography help to make this an important reference work and a valuable research tool.
Spectators on the Paris Stage in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by Barbara G. Mittman
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- PN2632 .M5 1984
Call Number: UCF ONLINE General Collection -- PQ1871 .P74 2014
NOTE: Online access is limited to a specific number of users per year.
In 1664, Molière's Tartuffe was banned from public performance. This book provides a detailed, in-depth account of five-year struggle (1664-69) to have the ban lifted and, so doing, sheds important new light on 1660s France and the ancien régime more broadly.
Music and Theatre in France, 1600-1800 by John S. Powell
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- ML1727.2 .P88 2000
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During the course of the 17th century, the dramatic arts reached a pinnacle of development in France; but despite the volumes devoted to the literature and theatre of the ancien regime, historians have largely neglected the importance of music and dance. This study defines the musicalpractices of comedy, tragicomedy, tragedy, and mythological and non-mythological pastoral drama, from the arrival of the first repertory companies in Paris until the establishment of the Comedie-Francaise. The dynamic interaction of the performing arts in primarily spoken theatre, cross-fertilizedby ballet de cour and imported Italian opera, gave rise to a set of musical conventions that later informed the pastorale en musique and early French pastoral opera. The performance history of four comedies-ballets by Moliere, Lully, and Charpentier leads to a discussion of the musical and balleticperformance practices of Moliere's theatre and the interconnections between Moliere's last comedie-ballet, Le Malade imaginaire, and Lully's first opera, Les Festes de l'Amour et de Bacchus.
Paris theatre audiences in the seventeenth & eighteenth centuries
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- PN2636.P3 L7 1957
Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV: Le mariage de la Grosse Cathos
Call Number: UCF MAIN General Collection -- GV1649 .H37 1994
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Dance played a major role in all French Baroque theatrical entertainments. Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos, a short ballet performed at the court of Louis XIV, is of major importance, largely because it has survived complete in all its components - choreography, music, and text - and also because it uses a previously unknown dance notation system. This book reproduces the entire manuscript of this ballet and provides a comprehensive study of the work itself and of the circumstances in which it was created and performed. Chapters devoted to the composer, choreographer, and performers provide a framework for understanding the performance context not only of this work, but of other court entertainments of the period. A study and evaluation of the notation system in which the dances are recorded, together with a detailed analysis of the dances, completes the introduction.
The Emergence of a Theatrical Science of Man in France, 1660 - 1740 by Logan J. Connors
Call Number: UCF MAIN General Collection -- PQ2105.A2 S8 2020
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The emergence of a theatrical science of man in France, 1660-1740 highlights a radical departure from discussions of dramatic literature and its undergirding rules to a new, relational discourse on the emotional power of theater. Through a diverse cast of religious theaterphobes, government officials, playwrights, art theorists and proto-philosophes, Connors shows the concerted effort in early Enlightenment France to use texts about theater to establish broader theories on emotion, on the enduring psychological and social ramifications of affective moments, and more generally, on human interaction, motivation, and social behavior. This fundamentally anthropological assessment of theater emerged in the works of anti-theatrical religious writers, who argued that emotional response was theater's raison d'être and that it was an efficient venue to learn more about the depravity of human nature. A new generation of pro-theatrical writers shared the anti-theatricalists' intense focus on the emotions of theater, but unlike religious theaterphobes, they did not view emotion as a conduit of sin or as a dangerous, uncontrollable process; but rather, as cognitive-affective moments of feeling and learning. Connors' study explores this reassessment of the theatrical experience which empowered writers to use plays, critiques, and other cultural materials about the stage to establish a theatrical science of man--an early Enlightenment project with aims to study and 'improve' the emotional, social, and political 'health' of eighteenth-century France.
The Commedia dell'Arte in Paris, 1644-1697 by Virginia P. Scott
Call Number: UCF Main Library General Collection -- PN2636.P4 C937 1990
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Utilizing archival and primary sources, it constructs a chronicle of the troupe's theatrical life, collects and evaluates biographical information about the actors, corrects hundreds of errors in previous scholarship, and introduces scenarios, dialogues, and stage business heretofore unavailable in English. It also traces the relationship of the troupe and the king who subsidized to - Louis X1V - and identifies a shift from personal patronage to institutionalized bureaucracy that had critical implications for all the Parisian theatres.
Guilty pleasures : theater, piety, and immorality in seventeenth-century France
Call Number: UCF MAIN General Collection -- DC1 .Y3 no.130 (2016)
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The latest volume of the Yale French Studies Series reexamines the vexed relationship between the theater and contemporary conceptions of morality in seventeenth-century France Although the Catholic Church condemned the power of plays to stir up compelling and irresistible passions, theater flourished in seventeenth-century France, making it the era's archetypal guilty pleasure. Bringing together specialists on theater and early modern culture from the United States, Britain, and France, the editors approach the intersections of morality, theater, guilt, and pleasure from a variety of perspectives. Individually and collectively, the articles in this volume juxtapose theoretical debates with case studies of actual dramatic practice.
Notable Plays
French Neoclassical Comedy (17th century)
Molière – Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The Imaginary Invalid, The Ridiculous Précieuses, The School for Wives, The School for Husbands, The Lavish Lovers
Jean de la Taille – The Rivals
Jacques Grévin – Taken by Surprise
Odete de Turnèbe – Satisfaction All Around
Pierre Corneille – The Theatrical Illusion
French Neoclassical Tragedy (17th century)
Pierre Corneille – The Cid, Cinna
Jean Racine – Phèdre, Brittanicus, Andromaque, Bérénice, Bajazet
French Divertissement (18th century)
Marivaux – Slave Island, The Colony, The Triumph of Love, The Isle of Reason, The Dispute
Thomas-Simon Gueullette – The Two Doubles, The Blind One-armed Deaf-mute, The Shit Merchant
Beaumarchais – The Seven-league Boots, The Marriage of Figaro, The Barber of Seville, The Guilty Mother