Katherine Astbury
Between October 2013 and September 2017 I ran an AHRC-funded project on French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era, with a follow-on project, also funded by the AHRC on Staging Napoleonic Theatre. I had a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on linking close textual readings to larger cultural, social and political issues. You can read more about the work on the project blog: http://ftne.hypotheses.org/ and on the websites for the 2 projects: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/napoleonictheatre/ and https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/currentprojects/stagingnapoleonictheatre/
I am currently working on a monograph on theatre during Napoleon's 100 days, using the spring of 1815 as a lens through which to undertake a retrospective analysis of Napoleonic theatre.
In 2012 I published a monograph on 'non-political' fiction of the 1790s as a response to the trauma of the Revolution (Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford, Legenda, 2012)). The work for this was funded by a British Academy Small Grant and an AHRC matching leave grant. The research has shown how the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of writers' traumatised response to the Revolution. Significantly, it is the writers who experience emigration and who would go on to be the avant-garde of the Romantic movement in France who succeed in working through their responses to the Revolution, while lesser writers remain trapped in the repetitive cycle of reliving the trauma without fully acknowledging the memories.
My first book on The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750-1789, examining the development of short fiction in the two countries in the years leading up to the French Revolution, was published by the Voltaire Foundation as SVEC 2002:7. Much of my work is centred on questions of literary history and the thorny problem of literary influence.
I have published on many of the principal figures of the 18th century and their relationship to short fiction. This includes Prévost, Beaumarchais, Marmontel, Baculard d'Arnaud and Sade. I have edited 'Memnon ou la sagesse humaine' for the Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. In 2003-04 I had a grant from the British Academy to look at fiction and the literary press during the Revolution. A number of articles based on this research are now in print.
I also have an interest in women writers of the late eighteenth century, working on the SIEFAR Grand dictionnaire des femmes de l'ancienne France and in collaboration with Suzan van Dijk on an international project on the reception of women writers funded by the NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). I am also part of the AHRC-funded team working on the correspondence of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, collaborating with Catriona Seth (Nancy) on the letters of Bernardin's sister, Catherine-Dorothée.
In December 2008 I organised an international conference on Le Tournant des Lumières at the Institut français in London. Two volumes of papers have been published : Bernardin de Saint-Pierre au tournant des Lumières (Leuven, Peeters, 2012) and Le Tournant des Lumières, ed. by Katherine Astbury and Catriona Seth (Paris, Garnier, 2012).
PhD supervision
I am happy to supervise theses on the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century. Current projects are listed below:
•Spectacle in the prints of the French Revolution (AHRC collaborative doctoral award, successfully completed 2012)
•Female playwrights of the 17th and 18th centuries
•The French émigrés in London
•Insects and the Enlightenment
•The Comédie française abroad during the First Empire
•Anglo-French theatrical relations under Napoleon
Address: United Kingdom
I am currently working on a monograph on theatre during Napoleon's 100 days, using the spring of 1815 as a lens through which to undertake a retrospective analysis of Napoleonic theatre.
In 2012 I published a monograph on 'non-political' fiction of the 1790s as a response to the trauma of the Revolution (Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford, Legenda, 2012)). The work for this was funded by a British Academy Small Grant and an AHRC matching leave grant. The research has shown how the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of writers' traumatised response to the Revolution. Significantly, it is the writers who experience emigration and who would go on to be the avant-garde of the Romantic movement in France who succeed in working through their responses to the Revolution, while lesser writers remain trapped in the repetitive cycle of reliving the trauma without fully acknowledging the memories.
My first book on The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750-1789, examining the development of short fiction in the two countries in the years leading up to the French Revolution, was published by the Voltaire Foundation as SVEC 2002:7. Much of my work is centred on questions of literary history and the thorny problem of literary influence.
I have published on many of the principal figures of the 18th century and their relationship to short fiction. This includes Prévost, Beaumarchais, Marmontel, Baculard d'Arnaud and Sade. I have edited 'Memnon ou la sagesse humaine' for the Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire. In 2003-04 I had a grant from the British Academy to look at fiction and the literary press during the Revolution. A number of articles based on this research are now in print.
I also have an interest in women writers of the late eighteenth century, working on the SIEFAR Grand dictionnaire des femmes de l'ancienne France and in collaboration with Suzan van Dijk on an international project on the reception of women writers funded by the NWO (the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). I am also part of the AHRC-funded team working on the correspondence of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, collaborating with Catriona Seth (Nancy) on the letters of Bernardin's sister, Catherine-Dorothée.
In December 2008 I organised an international conference on Le Tournant des Lumières at the Institut français in London. Two volumes of papers have been published : Bernardin de Saint-Pierre au tournant des Lumières (Leuven, Peeters, 2012) and Le Tournant des Lumières, ed. by Katherine Astbury and Catriona Seth (Paris, Garnier, 2012).
PhD supervision
I am happy to supervise theses on the second half of the 18th century and early 19th century. Current projects are listed below:
•Spectacle in the prints of the French Revolution (AHRC collaborative doctoral award, successfully completed 2012)
•Female playwrights of the 17th and 18th centuries
•The French émigrés in London
•Insects and the Enlightenment
•The Comédie française abroad during the First Empire
•Anglo-French theatrical relations under Napoleon
Address: United Kingdom
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Books by Katherine Astbury
Disponible en ligne : https://classiques-garnier.com/fievre-et-vie-du-theatre-sous-la-revolution-francaise-et-l-empire-table-des-matieres.html?displaymode=full
Papers by Katherine Astbury
French melodrama of the Napoleonic era was a form of total theater with text, music, and gesture inextricably linked in the creation of effect for the post-Revolutionary audience. Theater scholarship in France has long been dominated by textual analysis and, as a result, the interconnections between these elements of melodrama performance have been underexplored, although attempts “to ‘sonorize’ the study of melodrama” are becoming more widespread. Even the groundbreaking volumes of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt’s theater being produced currently perpetuate the subservience of music to text in that the play texts receive full critical apparatus whereas the scores do not.
The creative possibilities of practice as research as a way of moving beyond the study of words on the page is well established in the UK but has only recently begun to gather pace in France and this is leading to an important rapprochement between theory and practice with conférences-spectacles, séminaires-ateliers and historically informed performances by companies such as Théâtre à la Source.This article offers a case study of how public performances of two early nineteenth-century French melodramas can further interdisciplinary dialogue and question conventionally assumed beliefs about melodrama of the period.
TRABAJOS: Katherine Astbury (UW), Guillermo Nicieza Forcelledo (UNIOVI), Evaristo C. Martínez-Radío Garrido (CITCEM), Miguel Enrique Espigares Jiménez (FCM), Adrián Díaz Carrasco (UA) y María de la Paloma Chacón Domínguez (UCM).
PREFACIOS: Asociación Española de Jóvenes Modernistas/Napoleonic Historical Society-Mercy College.
ISSN 2697-2506
https://fusilierschasseursmadridasociacion.wordpress.com/revista-de-historia-napoleonica/
Disponible en ligne : https://classiques-garnier.com/fievre-et-vie-du-theatre-sous-la-revolution-francaise-et-l-empire-table-des-matieres.html?displaymode=full
French melodrama of the Napoleonic era was a form of total theater with text, music, and gesture inextricably linked in the creation of effect for the post-Revolutionary audience. Theater scholarship in France has long been dominated by textual analysis and, as a result, the interconnections between these elements of melodrama performance have been underexplored, although attempts “to ‘sonorize’ the study of melodrama” are becoming more widespread. Even the groundbreaking volumes of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixerécourt’s theater being produced currently perpetuate the subservience of music to text in that the play texts receive full critical apparatus whereas the scores do not.
The creative possibilities of practice as research as a way of moving beyond the study of words on the page is well established in the UK but has only recently begun to gather pace in France and this is leading to an important rapprochement between theory and practice with conférences-spectacles, séminaires-ateliers and historically informed performances by companies such as Théâtre à la Source.This article offers a case study of how public performances of two early nineteenth-century French melodramas can further interdisciplinary dialogue and question conventionally assumed beliefs about melodrama of the period.
TRABAJOS: Katherine Astbury (UW), Guillermo Nicieza Forcelledo (UNIOVI), Evaristo C. Martínez-Radío Garrido (CITCEM), Miguel Enrique Espigares Jiménez (FCM), Adrián Díaz Carrasco (UA) y María de la Paloma Chacón Domínguez (UCM).
PREFACIOS: Asociación Española de Jóvenes Modernistas/Napoleonic Historical Society-Mercy College.
ISSN 2697-2506
https://fusilierschasseursmadridasociacion.wordpress.com/revista-de-historia-napoleonica/
Podcast available from the link below.