How do you create a style of opera that speaks to everyone, when no one agrees on what it should say -- or how? French and Italian varieties of opera have intermingled and informed one another from the genre's first decades onward. Yet we still have only a hazy view of why and how those intersections occurred and what they meant to a givenopera's creators and audiences. Margaret Butler's Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century Parma: Entertainment, Sovereignty, Reform tackles these issues, examining performance, spectatorship, and politics in the Bourbon-controlled, northern Italian city of Parma in the mid-eighteenth century. Reconstructing the French context for Tommaso Traetta's Italian operas that consciously set out to fuse French and Italian elements, Butler explores Traetta's operas and recreations in Parma of operas and ballets by Jean-Philippe Rameau and other French composers. She shows that Parma's brand of entertainment is one in which Traetta's operas occupy points along a continuum representing a long and rich tradition of adaptation and generic play. Such a reading calls into question the very notion of operatic reform, showing the need for a more flexible conception of a volatile moment in opera's history. The book elucidates the complicated circumstances in which entertainments were created that spoke not only to Parma's multicultural audiences but also to an increasingly cosmopolitan Europe. MARGARET R. BUTLER is Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Relations between France and Britain have always been uneasy and ambivalent. But in cinema the Second World War changed all that for a time. Although the two countries' wartime fortunes differed, post-war both were busy reintegrating returning servicemen and prisoners of war and accommodating the changed aspirations of women. Margaret Butler examines these subjects and more in her comparative study of the cinemas of Britain and France during and after the war. Using the concept of community, she shows how cinema dealt with ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion and exclusion, unity and division. She also draws on contemporary debates and a perceptive reading of key films, to reveal afresh the meaning and appeal of such French classics as "Le Corbeau" and "Les Enfants du Paradis" and notable British productions such as "Waterloo Road" and "Passport to Pimlico."