Download E-books Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France: Stages and Histories, 1553–1797 PDF

By Amy Wygant

Bringing jointly the formerly disparate fields of ancient witchcraft, reception heritage, poetics, and psychoanalysis, this leading edge learn indicates how the glamour of the ancient witch, a spell that she forged, was once set on a path, over a span of 3 hundred years from the 16th to the eighteenth centuries, to turn into a quite often broadcast glamour of visual appeal. anything lady does, that's, turned anything that she has. The vintage heroine Medea, witch and barbarian, notorious poisoner, infanticide, regicide, scourge of philanderers, and indefatigable visitor, serves because the car of this improvement. Revived at the level of modernity by way of los angeles Péruse within the 16th century, Corneille within the 17th, and the operatic composer Cherubini within the eighteenth, her stagecraft and her witchcraft mix, writer Amy Wygant argues, to stun her viewers into opting for together with her magic and making it their very own. unlike past reports that have relied upon modern revealed resources so one can gauge viewers participation in and response to early glossy theater, Wygant argues that psychoanalytic thought of the habit of teams might be delivered to endure at the query of "what occurred" whilst the early smooth witch used to be staged. This cross-disciplinary learn unearths the miraculous early sleek trajectory of our modern obsession with magic. Medea figures the circulation of tradition in background, and within the reflect of the witch at the degree, a reflect either beautiful and appalling, our personal cultural performances are mirrored. It concludes with an research of Diderot's declare that the ancient strategy itself is magical, and with the instant in progressive France whilst the mild and fragile physique of the golden-throated singer, Julie-Angélique Scio, grew to become a Medea for modernity: no longer a witch or a child-murderess, yet, as all of the press stories insist, a lady.