Marriage, gender, and desire in early enlightenment German comedy [electronic resource] / Edward T. Potter.
2012
PN2652 .P68 2012eb
Linked e-resources
Linked Resource
Online Access
Details
Title
Marriage, gender, and desire in early enlightenment German comedy [electronic resource] / Edward T. Potter.
Author
Potter, Edward T.
ISBN
9781571138248 (electronic bk.)
9781571135292
1571135294
9781571135292
1571135294
Imprint
Rochester, N.Y. : Camden House, 2012.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (x, 198 p.)
Call Number
PN2652 .P68 2012eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
792.0943/09033
Summary
J.C. Gottsched, who reformed early Enlightenment German theater, claimed for comedy the ability to transform morality. The new literary comedies of the 1740s, among the other moral goals that they pursued, propagated a new sentimental discourse promoting marriage based on love while devaluing its traditional socioeconomic foundations. Yet in comedies by well-known dramatists of the period such as Gottsched, Gellert, J.E. Schlegel, Lessing, and Quistorp, alternative gender roles and sexual behaviors call the primacy of marriage into question: there are women who refuse to be integrated into marriage, episodes of cross-dressing that foreground the culturally constructed aspects of gender roles, instances of male same-sex desire, and allusions to female same-sex desire. Edward T. Potter examines this marital discourse in close readings of these authors' plays, uncovering the ambiguity of eighteenth-century comedy's stance on marriage and highlighting its resistance to the emerging discourse of the sentimental marriage. In addition to excavating the connections between the texts and norms regarding gender roles and sexual behavior, Potter also examines how these comedies self-reflexively perform their own reception in plays-within-plays that reflect upon early Enlightenment comedy, poetics, and pedagogical aesthetics and thereby comment on the efficacy of theater as a means of propagating such norms. Edward T. Potter is Associate Professor of German at Mississippi State University.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [179]-192) and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
Series
Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture
Available in Other Form
Marriage, gender, and desire in early enlightenment German comedy.
Linked Resources
Online Access
Record Appears in
Online Resources > Ebooks
All Resources
All Resources
Table of Contents
Introduction: Comedy, the sentimental marriage, and modes of resistance
Promoting the sentimental marriage in theory and in practice
The virgin huntress tamed: J. C. Gottsched's Atalanta and the erasure of female autonomy
Marriage brokering at the expense of economics: C. F. Gellert's Die Zartlichen schwestern
The clothes make the man: J. E. Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten frauen
Cross-dressing and gender performance in G. E. Lessing's Der Misogyne
Sickness masks desire in Th. J. Quistorp's Der Hypochondrist.
Promoting the sentimental marriage in theory and in practice
The virgin huntress tamed: J. C. Gottsched's Atalanta and the erasure of female autonomy
Marriage brokering at the expense of economics: C. F. Gellert's Die Zartlichen schwestern
The clothes make the man: J. E. Schlegel's Der Triumph der guten frauen
Cross-dressing and gender performance in G. E. Lessing's Der Misogyne
Sickness masks desire in Th. J. Quistorp's Der Hypochondrist.