French Comic Drama from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 454
Author(s):  
C. J. Gossip ◽  
Geoffrey Brereton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Comic Drama

Mademoiselle from Malibu: Eighteenth-Century Pastoral Romance, H-Bombs, and the Collaborative, Intertextual Gidget

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-264
Author(s):  
John Engle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Personal History ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
University Of Vienna ◽  
Textual Space ◽  
Core Subject ◽  
Big Ideas ◽  
Comic Drama ◽  
And Gender

Mostly dismissed as a trivial entertainment, Frederick Kohner’s Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957) is in fact a telling aesthetic and cultural document. University of Vienna PhD, Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, and successful Hollywood screenwriter Kohner empathetically fictionalized his teenage daughter’s adventures with the original Malibu surf crew and in the process vividly signaled the emergence of a rebellious postwar youth culture. Just as interesting is the way Kohner’s entertaining comic drama of feminist awakening plays out through an intriguingly complex narrative voice, one blurring distinctions between its California teen daughter-protagonist-narrator and the father-author, both learned European exile and savvy Tinseltown operator. In subtly decisive ways, Kohner intervenes allusively and intertextually in the central narrative to anchor buoyant personal history in larger philosophical and political questions, in a cosmopolitan resistance to American puritanical norms, and in knowing reflection on contemporary discussions of representation and image. Gidget is a surprisingly postmodern textual space of disruption and juxtaposition that compellingly addresses its stealth core subject, a postwar America with its Western philosophical baggage and political and historical burden fumbling awkwardly forward toward new social and gender models.

Formal Experimentation and Theories of Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Neoclassical Theory ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
Comic Drama ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Early Novel

This chapter situates the theory and practice of the early novel in the context of developing ideas about literary art in general. It argues that issues such as the relationship between fiction and probability, or between historical fact and allegorical truth, belonged to a wider and evolving discussion of literary art. The neoclassical rules that predominated in the Restoration came under challenge in the early eighteenth century, a reassessment that facilitated the ‘rise of the novel’ after 1740. On the other hand, the evident exclusion of the novel from an authoritative classical tradition made this ambiguous form artistically undisciplined and morally suspect. Particularly as the outlaw ‘novel’ began to gain a real foothold in the print marketplace during the 1720s, proving its ability to captivate readers in ways not authorized in neoclassical theory, it needed to be harmonized with the tradition of the epic, comic drama, and other ancient genres.

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