La « configuration en tiers-lieu », une mise en scène du changement social

Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

Cultural History ◽

10.3366/cult.2020.0207 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 26-45

Author(s):

Sarah J. Adams

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Denis Diderot ◽

Middle Classes ◽

Late Eighteenth Century ◽

German States ◽

Political Sources ◽

Mise En Scene ◽

Peripheral Position ◽

Histoire Des Deux Indes ◽

Political Leverage

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.

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Aquarelles parisiennes: Gautier, Baudelaire, and the Poetry of Urban Watercolours

Nottingham French Studies ◽

10.3366/nfs.2019.0246 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 58 (2) ◽

pp. 170-182

Author(s):

Karen F. Quandt

Keyword(s):

Urban Landscape ◽

Second Empire ◽

Theophile Gautier ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Meeting Point ◽

Mise En Scene ◽

Bleed Through ◽

Fleurs Du Mal

Baudelaire refers in his first essay on Théophile Gautier (1859) to the ‘fraîcheurs enchanteresses’ and ‘profondeurs fuyantes’ yielded by the medium of watercolour, which invites a reading of his unearthing of a romantic Gautier as a prescription for the ‘watercolouring’ of his own lyric. If Paris's environment was tinted black as a spiking population and industrial zeal made their marks on the metropolis, Baudelaire's washing over of the urban landscape allowed vivid colours to bleed through the ‘fange’. In his early urban poems from Albertus (1832), Gautier's overall tint of an ethereal atmosphere as well as absorption of chaos and din into a lulling, muted harmony establish the balmy ‘mise en scène’ that Baudelaire produces at the outset of the ‘Tableaux parisiens’ (Les Fleurs du mal, 1861). With a reading of Baudelaire's ‘Tableaux parisiens’ as at once a response and departure from Gautier, or a meeting point where nostalgia ironically informs an avant-garde poetics, I show in this paper how Baudelaire's luminescent and fluid traces of color in his urban poems, no matter how washed or pale, vividly resist the inky plumes of the Second Empire.

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