Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama (Hardcover, New Ed)

Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Koerner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Koerner's play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

General

Imprint:	Ashgate Publishing Limited
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Release date:	2016
First published:	2016
Authors:	Wendy Sutherland
Dimensions:	234 x 156 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	272
Edition:	New Ed
ISBN-13:	978-1-4094-2402-4
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Plays & playwrights > General
LSN:	1-4094-2402-2
Barcode:	9781409424024

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