During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, France became
famous - notorious even - across Europe for its ambitious attempts
to codify and theorise a system of universally valid dramatic
'rules'. So fundamental and formative was this 'classical'
conception of drama that it still underpins our modern conception
of theatre today. Yet rather than rehearsing familiar arguments
about plays, Inventing the Spectator reads early modern France's
dramatic theory against the grain, tracing instead the profile and
characteristics of the spectator that these arguments imply: the
living, breathing individual in whose mind, senses, and experience
the theatre comes to life. In so doing, Joseph Harris raises
numerous questions - of imagination and illusion, reason and
emotion, vision and aurality, to name but a few - that strike at
the very heart of human psychology, cognition, and experience.
Bridging the gap between literary and theatre studies, history of
psychology, and intellectual history, Inventing the Spectator thus
reconstructs the theatre spectator's experience as it was
understood and theorised within French dramatic theory between the
Renaissance and the Revolution. It explores early modern
spectatorship through three main themes (illusion and the senses;
pleasure and narrative; interest and identification) and five key
dramatic theoreticians (d'Aubignac, Corneille, Dubos, Rousseau, and
Diderot). As it demonstrates, the period's dramatic rules are at
heart rules of psychology, cognition, and affect that emerged out
of a complex dialogue with human subjectivity in all its richness.
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