Jeffrey S. Ravel – författare

In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court—and later its Enlightened opponents—to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.

In the playhouses of eighteenth-century France, clerks and students, soldiers and merchants, and the occasional aristocrat stood in the pit, while the majority of the elite sat in loges. These denizens of the parterre, who accounted for up to two-thirds of the audience, were given to disruptive behavior that culminated in full-scale riots in the last years before the Revolution. Offering a commoner's eye view of the drama offstage, this fascinating history of French theater audiences clearly demonstrates how problems in the parterre reflected tensions at the heart of the Old Regime.Jeffrey S. Ravel vividly depicts the scene in the parterre where the male spectators occupied themselves shoving one another, drinking, urinating, and confronting the actors with critiques of the performance. He traces the futile efforts of the Bourbon Court—and later its Enlightened opponents—to control parterre behavior by both persuasion and force. Ravel describes how the parterre came to represent a larger, more politicized notion of the public, one that exposed the inability of the government to accommodate the demands of French citizens. An important contribution to debates on the public sphere, Ravel's book is the first to explore the role of the parterre in the political culture of eighteenth-century France.

Drawing on unusual archival materials, addressing a variety of nonliterary or extratextual sources, employing new theoretical approaches, and offering innovative discussions of established works, the essays gathered in the latest volume of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture reflect the most exciting new directions of research within the field. The novel is a dominant focus, and the contributors to this volume offer new perspectives on the genre itself or bold new readings of such canonical texts as Les Liaisons dangereuses, Cecilia, Histoire de M. Cleveland, and the early fiction of Daniel Defoe, as well as Casanova's novelistic autobiography, Histoire de ma vie. Some essays use unusual or little-known sources or materials:-the early English novel, The Jamaica Lady; an anonymous British seaman's journal; and "infant's petitions," the letters that accompanied babies left at foundling hospitals.Other essays examine the complicated constructions of identity and authorship that emerge in various disciplines and genres: depictions of statuary in eighteenth-century French painting and literature; representations of the French literary marketplace; the role of singing in the poetry of Stephen Duck; the presence of ancient Stoic and Baconian principles in Samuel Johnson's moral writing; and the complicated correspondence between Horace Walpole and William Cole. The volume concludes with a special section of essays meditating on the complex eighteenth-century discourse on beauty and aesthetics. Contributors: Jeffrey Barnouw, Barbara Benedict, Melissa Downes, Ted Emery, Timothy Erwin, Susan Greenfield, George Haggerty, Adam Komisaruk, Laurence Mall, James Mullholland, Alexander Pitosfsky, David Porter, Neil Saccamano, Laura Schattschneider, April Shelford, Peter Sonderen, Geoffrey Turnovsky, Caroline Weber

With this well-illustrated new volume, the SECC continues its tradition of publishing innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the interpretive edge.Essays include:Misty Anderson, Our Purpose is the Same: Whitefield, Foote, and the Theatricality of Methodism Tili Boon Cuille, La Vraisemblance du merveilleux: Operatic Aesthetics in Cazotte's Fantastic Fiction Simon Dickie, Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate: The Roasting of Adams Lynn Festa, Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France Blake Gerard, All that the heart wishes: Changing Views toward Sentimentality Reflected in Visualizations of Sterne's Maria, 1773-1888 Jennifer Keith, The Sins of Sensibility and the Challenge of Antislavery Poetry Mary Helen McMurran, Aphra Behn from Both Sides: Translation in the Atlantic World Leslie Richardson, Leaving her Father's House: Locke, Astell, and Clarissa's Body Politic Sandra Sherman, The Wealth of Nations in the 1790s Alan Sikes, Snip Snip Here, Snip Snip There, and a Couple of Tra La Las: The Rise and Fall of the Castrato Singer Rivka Swenson, Representing Modernity in Jane Barker's Galesia Trilogy: Jacobite Allegory and the Aesthetics of the Patch-Work Subject

This well-illustrated new volume continues the tradition of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture of publishing innovative interdisciplinary scholarship on the interpretive edge. Contents include: ASECS Women's Caucus Roundtable: The Career and Work of Madelyn GutwirthCarol Blum, Madeleine Dobie, Madelyn Gutwirth, Katherine Jensen, Sarah Maza, Karyna Szmurlo, and Janet Whately The Plantation and the Polis: Reform Ideology and the Generic Structure in Matthew Lewis' Journal of the West Indian ProprietorEllen Malenas Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth CenturyVanessa Smith The People Things Make: Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Properties of SelfMark Blackwell Covering Sexual Disguise: Passing Women and Generic RestraintFraser Easton Sapphic Self-Fashioning in the Baroque Era: Women's Petrarchan Parody in English and Spanish, 1650-1700Dianne Dugaw and Amanda W. Powell "Why, you...I oughta'...": Aposiopesis and the Natural Language of the Passions, 1670-1770Robert G.Dimit From Geneva to Glasgow: Rousseau and Adam Smith on the Theatre and Commercial SocietyRyan Hanley Faux savants, femmes philosophes, and philosophes amoureux: Foibles of the philosophe on the Eighteenth-Century French StageAnne Vila The New Paris in the Guise of the Old: Louis Sebastian Mercier from Old Regime to RevolutionJoanna Stalnaker Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental JourneyDanielle Bobker Hyperborean Atlantis: Jean-Sylvian Bailly, Madame Blavatsky, and the Nazi MythDan Edelstein