The past decade has overflowed in a raging stream of contradictions. Old certainties have yielded to relentless insecurity over a time when much of the human experience got immeasurably better even as many things only ever seemed to get worse. As Paul du Quenoy's globetrotting criticism reveals, the arts were in a ferment that matched profound and yet totally unpredicted social and political transformations. Balanced, sometimes precariously, against the demands of an absurd and increasingly superfluous academic career, du Quenoy spent the 2010s seeking enlightenment, inspiration, and, above all, diversion, in total works of art all over the world, ranging from the traditional cultural capitals to humbler and more remote surroundings. Peering through the prism of performance, Through the Years With Prince Charming offers a unique bird's eye view of art and life in a changing world.

What is "cancel culture." A new phrase in popular circulation for less than two years, it has provoked passionate denunciations from observers concerned with civil liberties, especially rights of free speech and expression, and apologetic defenses from opponents who advocate equity and accountability in light of new mores. Still others deny that "cancel culture" exists at all, while many claim never to have heard of it. In Cancel Culture: Tales from the Front Lines, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy presents a series of case studies that reveal the new phenomenon known as "cancel culture" as experienced or claimed in media, academia, the arts, public space, and other areas of ideological controversy. More than a bald denunciation or frustrated description of an unfamiliar new concept, this groundbreaking approach seeks to understand "cancel culture" as a process - how it starts and stops, where it comes from and leads, and how and, indeed, whether it might one day end. This penetrating and highly original analysis sheds light on a society grappling feverishly with fundamental issues of freedom and liberty.

When did Russia become "modern?" Historians of Russia - including even many Russian historians - have long tried to identify Russia's "modern" moment. While most scholars have looked to economic or ideological transitions, noted historian and critic Paul du Quenoy approaches the problem through culture, and specifically the performing arts, as told through the prism of one of its leading nineteenth-century practitioners, the composer and critic Alexander Serov. Born in 1820, Serov grew to adulthood under the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855). Long disparaged as a dark and reactionary period of Russia's past, it instead offered many educational, cultural, and professional opportunities that conventional histories have failed to appreciate. Educated in law and tutored in music, Serov rose to become Russia's first significant music critic and a noted composer whose three operas won him fame and gestured toward the creation of a national style. Although his renown was fleeting after his untimely death in 1871, his life and observations provide a vital eyewitness account to a Russia poised to embrace a fresh and fully modern identity. In a new and revised edition prepared to mark the 150th anniversary of Serov's death, du Quenoy's pastiche of Russian life offers one of the best approaches to Russia's imperial past and its legacies today.

Paul du Quenoy's acclaimed book reinterprets the works and ideas of Richard Wagner and their profound influence on the artistic, intellectual, and social life of modern France. Wagner's Romanticism influenced the French symbolists so greatly that they named their major journal La Revue Wagnerienne. His musical themes, dramatic structures and philosophical tropes recurred in the works of almost every major French composer before World war One. Massenet was so devoted that he earned the sobriquet "Madamoiselle Wagner". Proust employed Wagnerian concepts and allusions in his modernist fiction and publically defended Wagner's artistic achievements against the general assault on German kultur during the 1914-1918 war. Wagner remained important during the interwar years as well as the occupation 1940-1944 and after the Liberation. Du Quenoy interprets the phenomenon of France's infatuation with Wagner and discusses why Wagner's influence has been misunderstood and understudied. The author points to the effects of competition, war and political recrimination. In the face of such bitter struggle who would expect a German cultural icon to have played such an important and consistent role in French life? The author points to the strength and uniqueness of Wagner's creativity and his spiritual universalism as the answer.

In June 1920, assessing the international significance of the revolutionary era that had brought him to power in Russia, Vladimir Lenin adopted a theatrical idiom for one of its most important events, the Revolution of 1905. "Without the 'dress rehearsal' of 1905," he wrote, "the victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible." According to Lenin's statement, political anatomy borrowed in a teleological sense from the performing arts.

This book explores an inversion of Lenin's statement. Rather than question how politics took after the performing arts, Paul du Quenoy assesses how culture responded to power in late imperial Russia. Exploring the impact of this period's rapid transformation and endemic turmoil on the performing arts, he examines opera, ballet, concerts, and "serious" drama while not overlooking newer artistic forms thriving at the time, such as "popular" theater, operetta, cabaret, satirical revues, pleasure garden entertainments, and film. He also analyzes how participants in the Russian Empire's cultural life articulated social and political views.

Du Quenoy proposes that performing arts culture in late imperial Russia--traditionally assumed to be heavily affected by and responsive to contemporary politics--was often apathetic and even hostile to involvement in political struggles. Stage Fright offers a similar refutation of the view that the late imperial Russian government was a cultural censor prefiguring Soviet control of the arts. Through a clear picture of the relationship between culture and power, this study presents late imperial Russia as a modernizing polity with a vigorous civil society capable of weathering the profound changes of the twentieth century rather than lurching toward an "inevitable" disaster of revolution and civil war.

Offers students different critical perspectives on major historical events, drawn from all time periods and from all parts of the globe. Each volume has a thematic, era or subject-specific focus and contains roughly 50 entries. Entries begin with a brief overview summarizing the controversy followed by two or more signed, point-counterpoint essays.