Introduction: observing the ellipsis 1. Ellipsis marks in early printed drama 2. Chasms and the eighteenth-century novel 3. Ellipsis and the ends of novels 4. Nineteenth-century 'explorations in Dot-and-Dashland' 5. Ellipsis and modernity.

Ellipsis in English Literature: Signs of Omission

‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,’ writes Oscar Wilde in his ‘Preface’ to the 1891 book edition of his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. By transferring agency away from the originator to the recipient, Wilde’s aphorism could be considered a late nineteenth-century version of reception theory, which has sought to challenge conventional critical ideas of influence or tradition in classical studies in recent decades.

The Introduction to this thesis relates the classically educated Wilde’s epigram, which supposedly originated with his Trinity College Dublin tutor, John Pentland Mahaffy, to the dissolution of authority both inside and outside Classics during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1 explores the broadly similar critical sentiments in Wilde’s press correspondence and his defence of his writings in his 1895 libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde’s inverted ideas of reading, I argue, are informed by the plays of Euripides and Aristophanes.

Chapters 2 and 3 turn Wilde’s inverted ideas of reading on their head. Chapter 2 argues that Wilde’s use of the Orpheus story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is revealing about not only Dorian Gray’s but also his author’s troubled relations with both sexes. Chapter 3 shows how Wilde uses Aeschylus’ Agamemnon in his fairy tales and plays to represent unhappy heterosexual relations in contradistinction to a positively portrayed Platonic pedagogical pederasty—a juxtaposition that is reflected in Wilde’s life as well as his work.

Chapter 4 reverts to Wilde’s idea that artistic meaning is in the eye of the beholder. The religious relativism and oscillation between literary sources in Wilde’s drama Salome, which is viewed as an example of ‘Alexandrian’ Euripideanism, contribute to an atmosphere of narcissistic subjectivism and projectionism that meet with the full condemnation of official authority.

Looking with Narcissus: Oscar Wilde’s Reception of the Dying God

Au XVIIe siecle, la composition dramatique (c’est-a-dire l’art de faire se rencontrer les personnages sur le plateau en un certain ordre pour raconter une histoire) est revolutionnee, aux alentours de 1640, par l’instauration de la regle de la liaison des scenes, qui prescrit que, a l’interieur d’un acte, un personnage au moins soit commun a deux scenes successives. Cette regle a totalement et durablement change l’aspect des pieces de theâtre en imposant une esthetique de la continuite qui rompt avec la discontinuite qui prevalait jusqu’alors. Dans les pieces du debut du siecle, l’action progressait par la juxtaposition de scenes qui presentaient chacune des personnages differents, permettant ainsi au dramaturge d’introduire de brusques changements dans les lieux, les temps et les situations. Au contraire, les pieces qui respectent la regle de la liaison des scenes ne peuvent plus compter que sur les entractes pour renouveler completement les personnages presents sur le plateau : a l’interieur des actes, l’action doit evoluer par glissements successifs, chaque scene conservant une partie des parametres de la scene precedente. En mettant en lumiere les choix auxquels le dramaturge est confronte, la difference entre ces deux esthetiques temoigne de l’importance de la composition dramatique : ecrire une piece, ce n’est pas seulement imaginer une intrigue, mais aussi lui donner une forme visuelle et specifiquement theâtrale. Ce travail s’interesse donc a la fois aux enjeux propres a la liaison des scenes, et, plus generalement, a la poetique de la disposition des scenes et au «montage» dramatique auquel le dramaturge se livre pour donner corps a la fiction.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01504340/document

La composition dramatique

oldest surviving works of literature derived from oral performance. Deeply embedded in these works is the notion that they were intended to be heard: there is something musical about Homer’s use of language and a vivid quality to his images that transcends the written page to create a theatrical experience for the listener. Indeed, it is precisely the theatrical quality of the poems that would inspire later interpreters to cast the Odyssey and the Iliad in a host of other media-novels, plays, poems, paintings, and even that most elaborate of all art forms, opera, exemplified by no less a work than Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria. In Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, scholars in classics, drama, Italian literature, art history, and musicology explore the journey of Homer’s Odyssey from ancient to modern times. The book traces the reception of the Odyssey through the Italian humanist sources—from Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto—to the treatment of the tale not only by Monteverdi but also such composers as Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Gluck, and Alessandro Scarlatti, and the dramatic and poetic traditions thereafter by such modern writers as Derek Walcott and Margaret Atwood.

Performing Homer: The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera

La poetique du denouement pre-moderne, dans les tragedies italiennes, francaises et espagnoles, est liee a un souci ethique: la fin de l'intrigue est le lieu attendu qui en devoile le sens et qui dit sa morale. Or, le denouement tragique repond a une double exigence: s'il conclut la tragedie, il doit aussi renverser le sort du heros. Pour achever la tragedie, le denouement doit realiser un equilibre moral; pour renverser l'intrigue, il doit susciter un exces pathetique. Ces deux exigences sont issues de deux modeles theoriques opposes: la logique de l'exemplarite et l'efficacite pathetique. La these analyse les strategies poetiques que theoriciens et dramaturges mettent en place pour concilier ces deux modeles poetiques, au sein des trois criteres qui definissent le denouement (son orientation, ses modalites et sa structure) et des problemes ethiques qu'ils posent (l'enchainement de la causalite, la faute et la retribution du heros). Les efforts pour concilier exemplarite et pathetique se soldent par un echec. En depit de leurs differences, les trois traditions nationales denoncent les faiblesses de la logique de l'exemplarite, qui ne permet pas de justifier, par une regle de conduite universelle, l'experience du malheur, du desordre, de l'injustice. Le denouement tragique incite alors le spectateur a un dechiffrement hermeneutique pour trouver des raisons a la misere inexplicable du heros, que manifeste le renversement de fortune.

Fins tragiques : poétique et éthique du dénouement dans la tragédie pré-moderne en Italie, en France et en Espagne

Frontispice: Page de titre des deux premieres Dissertations, 1663 Introduction 1. Vie de l'Abbe d'Aubignac 2. Les Etapes de la Querelle de Sophonisbe 3. D'Aubignac Critique 4. Le Texte Bibliographie Dissertations Contre Corneille Premiere Dissertation Seconde Dissertation Troisieme Dissertation Quatrieme Dissertation Index

Dissertations contre Corneille

Word as action

Verbal action and rhetorical theory formal oratory - trials, embassies and councils informal oratory - the protagonists, the confidants self-persuasion - monologues persuasive narrations. Appendix: Scheme of "inventio" and "dispositio".

Word As Action: Racine, Rhetoric, and Theatrical Language

Comment jouait-on le rôle d'Hippolyte dans la Phèdre de Racine?: Témoignage d'un manuscrit inédit

Two RECENT WRITERS ABOUT illustrations in seventeenth-century books have claimed that their primary function is to inform readers. 'La premiere fonction du livre illustre est [... ] de livrer une information', says Michel Pastoureau. We might say that a book illustration that informs is based on a continuity between image and text such that a reader experiencing the image before the text will find in the image a helpful and straightforward anticipation of the text itself. There is something to be said for this approach to the illustrations that accompanied seventeenth-century dramatic texts, but it is not unproblematic. If, by way of preliminary background, we look at the evolution of the illustrated frontispiece for dramatic works in the seventeenth century, we shall see the relevance of the view that presents the frontispiece as part of a kind of informational flow between image and text, but we shall also start to sense the limitations of this view. In the first part of the seventeenth century, the illustrated frontispiece acted as a title page, and, therefore, inevitably contained important publishing information. We can see this in the title page for the first edition of Alexandre Hardy's plays, published in 1624 (Fig. 1, p. 98). In the top half, the image, with its depiction of a raised stage and spectators in front, suggests that the work contains plays. The stage itself hints at the kind of plays to follow: tragedies, tragicomedies and pastorals. The Muse of Tragedy, Melpomene, features centrally, but the rustic scene to the left and the satyr-like figure to the right point towards the worlds of tragicomedy and pastoral. The top half of the image clearly suggests something of the content of the work, but the informative function of this frontispiece is even more in evidence in the bottom half, where an architectural frame foregrounds the title of the work, the author, his provenance, the work's dedicatee, the publisher, and the date and place of publication. The clearly informative nature of the frontispiece is diluted a few years later. We can see in the illustration that accompanied the first edition of Corneille's Cinna in 1643 (Fig. 2, p. 99) a very considerable change in the proportion of the illustration devoted to raw information and the proportion devoted to a picture in some sense representing the content of the work. We now have less publishing information and, what there is, is decentred. The title of the work is given prominently in the top left, but the author is not named, and the publisher, date and place of publication are given unobtrusively in the bottom right. It was usual in books with this kind of frontispiece for there also to be a separate page giving the full publishing information more clearly as text. Readers looking at this

Seventeenth-Century French Theatre and its Illustrations: Five Types of Discontinuity

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