Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century - download pdf or read online

Stagestruck strains the making of a colourful French theater among the reign of Louis XIV and the French Revolution. in this period greater than 80 provincial and colonial towns celebrated the inauguration in their first public playhouses. those theaters emerged because the so much fashionable city cultural associations in prerevolutionary France, changing into key websites for the articulation and contestation of social, political, and racial relationships. Combining wealthy description with nuanced research according to large archival proof, Lauren R. Clay illuminates the wide-ranging effects of theater's magnificent development for performers, spectators, and specialists in towns all through France in addition to within the empire's most vital Atlantic colony, Saint-Domingue.

Clay argues that outdoor Paris the growth of theater happened via neighborhood initiative, civic engagement, and entrepreneurial funding, instead of via activities or regulations undertaken by way of the royal govt and its brokers. Reconstructing the enterprise of theatrical construction, she brings to mild the efforts of a wide range of traders, marketers, administrators, and actors-including girls and folks of color-who seized the possibilities provided by means of advertisement theater to develop into vital brokers of cultural change.

Portraying an essential and more and more consumer-oriented public sphere past the capital, Stagestruck overturns the long-held inspiration that cultural swap flowed from Paris and the royal courtroom to the provinces and colonies. This deeply researched e-book will attract historians of Europe and the Atlantic international, quite these attracted to the social and political influence of the shopper revolution and the forging of nationwide and imperial cultural networks. as well as theater and literary students, it's going to allure the eye of historians and sociologists who research company, hard work historical past, and the emergence of the fashionable French state.