This study has attempted to show that the plays of La Chaussée, which were popular in France in the middle to lat eighteenth century, were popular because they appealed to social values of the period, and particularly because they expressed a conservative view of society and of the role of women in that society. The introduction sets forth the historical and biographical background of La Chaussée, the extent of the success achieved by his "comédies larmoyantes" in performance and in publication during the eighteenth century, and the reasons for selecting the five plays on which this study concentrates. The focus on, female characters is explained by the number of plays "about" women: Mélanide, La Gouvernante, L'Ecole des méres and by the tendency in literary criticism to consider eighteenth-century French tastes in theatre dictated by women. Chapter I presents a content analysis of the five plays. This technique, taken from Goodlad, A Sociology of Popular Drama, provides plot summaries of these now unfamiliar plays which are used as a basis for chapter II. Furthermore it permits determination and comparison of these themes, settings, areas of conflict explored and types of resolution offered in the plays under examination. La Chaussée most frequently presents the problems of marital and familial love, and resolves conflicts with reconciliation, marriage, or another form of social integration. Goodlad brings out the relationship between popular success and a play's at least implicit didacticism and its conservatism in form and content. Chapter II uses narratological analysis techniques from Bremond, Logique du récit. The plays are considered as texts. The purpose here is to bring to light the structure of plot: how resolution in delayed or achieved, what roles -- victim, beneficiary, assistant, frustrator -- female character play in that structure. Heroines are found to be passive victims, beneficiaries, or even frustrators. Secondary female characters play minor assistant roles, or act as frustrators for the heroines. Resolution is achieved by male characters. Chapter III turns to discourse, how much and what is said about the female sex and/or by female characters. It examines the quantity, content and situation of female discourse in these plays, and particularly the social and situational restraints on discourse. A female character usually only has one scene with male characters in which she speaks half or more of the total lines, unless she is alone with someone over whom she has affective influence, and not her husband. Maids are used to express generalizations about the situation of women in society, and sympathy for the heroine. The discourse of heroines centres on the standards of virtue to which society holds them: patience, endurance, chastity, obedience. In the conclusion, critical judgments on La Chaussée from the eighteenth century to the present are reviewed and examined. Doubt is cast on the extent to which La Chaussée should be seen as promoting theatrical or social reform, and increased emphasis in placed on the nature of his didacticism, and the pervasiveness of his conservatism. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 12, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1990. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 281-289).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2008. / Vita. Advisor : Rebecca Schneider. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 240-280).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2001. / Adviser: Barbara Freedman. Submitted to the Dept. of Theatre Studies. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 345-385). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Since her work as a professional playwright in the 1670s and 1680s, critics have sought to equate Aphra Behn and her plays, to fix and stabilize the body of the writer and of her work. She has been marked as a prostitute, a feminist, and a masculinist hack, in each case her gender determining the value of and audience for her writing. This dissertation argues that Behn's plays--and Behn--should be read in terms of her controlling tropes and forms of performance and intrigue. Her plays and her presence use these tropes and forms to decenter the idea of identity and manipulate conventions of gender roles in the patriarchal Restoration theater. In doing so, she recasts and reconstitutes the structure of the patriarchal theater and economy. Chapter 1 introduces my argument and presents an overview of critical and feminist responses to Behn. I use this overview to present my own view of identity as performance, opposing such essentialist theorists as Helene Cixous. Chapter 2 develops the historical and metaphorical associations of intrigue and performance, beginning with her Preface to The Dutch Lover; in reading two of her lesser-known intrigue-comedies, The Dutch Lover and The Feign'd Curtezans, or a Night's Intrigue, I then argue that performance and intrigue challenge the conventional engendering of roles such as the rake and the courtesan. Chapter 3 expands these associations and reads her economic metaphors, as I look at Behn's most famous intrigue-comedy, The Rover, and its sequel; as well as challenging conventional roles and economic valuations, however, The Rover, Part II emphasizes the ultimate inescapability of these roles and valuations in the patriarchal theater. Chapter 4 moves to her town-comedies; I argue that Behn adapts the intrigue-form to her comedies of manners, working out the characters' struggle between convention and nature to define public and private selves. Sir Patient Fancy sets up the power that the manipulation of convention offers; The City Heiress emphasizes the limits of such manipulation; The Lucky Chance offers magic and ambiguity as new theatrical possibility to subvert convention and recast role.

This thesis examines the production process for "Camp, Vamp and Femme Fatale," performed at the University of North Texas in April of 1997. The first chapter applies Henry Jenkins's theory of textual poaching to the authors' and cast's reappropriation of cultural narratives about female vampires. The chapter goes on to survey the narrative, cinematic and critical work on women as vampires. As many of the texts were developed as part of the fantasy role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade, this chapter also surveys how fantasy role-playing develops unpublished texts that can make fruitful ground for performance studies. The second chapter examines the rehearsal and production process in comparison to the work of Glenda Dickerson and other feminist directors.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation examines the arguments against tragedy offered by feminist playwrights in their "re-visions" of the plays of Euripides and Shakespeare. / In the first part, I maintain that feminist dramatic re-vision is one manifestation of an unrecognized tradition of women's writing in which criticism is expressed through fiction. I also argue that the project of feminist dramatic re-vision embodies a feminist "new poetics." / In the second part, I examine the aesthetics and politics of tragedy from a feminist perspective. Feminist arguments against tragedy are, in effect arguments against patriarchy. But it is the theorists and critics of tragedy---not the playwrights---who are unequivocally aligned with patriarchy. Playwrights like Euripides and Shakespeare can be seen to destabilize tragedy in their plays. / In the third part, I show how recent feminist playwrights (Jackie Crossland, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, Deborah Porter, Caryl Churchill and David Lan, Maureen Duffy, Alison Lyssa, The Women's Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein, Joan Ure, Margaret Clarke, and Ann-Marie MacDonald) counter tragedy by extrapolating from the arguments presented by Euripides and Shakespeare in The Medea, The Bacchae, King Lear, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Othello , and by allocating voice and agency to their female protagonists.