Theater and Nation in Eighteenth-Century Germany
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A01=Michael J. Sosulski
acting
Author_Michael J. Sosulski
Bodily Discipline
body discipline theory
bourgeois
Bourgeois Tragedy
Category=ATD
Category=DSB
Common Language
cultural identity formation
Devious
dramaturgy
Eighteenth Century
Eighteenth Century German
Eighteenth Century Germany
eighteenth-century drama
ekhof
emergence of national theatre in Germany
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Face To Face
Foucauldian analysis
friedrich
German Actor
German Enlightenment
German Language Theater
German National Theater
German Theater
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Guts Muths
hamburg
Hamburg Dramaturgy
Hamburg National Theater
Home Town
Karl Theodor
konrad
mannheim
Mannheim National Theater
Muscular Bonding
national
National Theater Projects
performative nationalism
Popular Gymnastics
tragedy
Veiled Mediation
Veiling Techniques
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9780754637196
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 May 2007
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1767, more than a century before Germany was incorporated as a modern nation-state, the city of Hamburg chartered the first Deutsches Nationaltheater. What can it have meant for a German playhouse to have been a national theater, and what did that imply about the way these theaters operated? Michael Sosulski contends that the idea of German nationhood not only existed prior to the Napoleonic Wars but was decisive in shaping cultural production in the last third of the eighteenth century, operating not on the level of popular consciousness but instead within representational practices and institutions. Grounding his study in a Foucauldian understanding of emergent technologies of the self, Sosulski connects the increasing performance of body discipline by professional actors, soldiers, and schoolchildren to the growing interest in German national identity. The idea of a German cultural nation gradually emerged as a conceptual force through the work of an influential series of literary intellectuals and advocates of a national theater, including G. E. Lessing and Friedrich Schiller. Sosulski combines fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known dramas, with analysis of eighteenth-century theories of nationhood and evolving acting theories, to show that the very lack of a strong national consciousness in the late eighteenth century actually spurred the emergence of the German Nationaltheater, which were conceived in the spirit of the Enlightenment as educational institutions. Since for Germans, nationality was a performed identity, theater emerged as an ideal space in which to imagine that nation.
Michael J. Sosulski is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of German, Kalamazoo College, USA.
