Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s)

In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s) Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat (eds.) focus on a fundamental question that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of theatre studies: how and to what extent did the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience ― among both theatregoers and readers of drama ― contribute, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’? Developing a post-Habermasian understanding of the public sphere, the articles in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of forms, locations, and cultures across early modern Europe ― and in Asia.

Katja Gvozdeva, Ph.D (1994) in French Literature, Gorky Institute of World Literature (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), has been doing research and teaching in Germany since 1998 and is member of the ERC-funded project Early Modern Drama and the Cultural Net (“DramaNet”) at the Freie Universität Berlin. She has published on French, Italian, and German literature and theatre, medieval and early modern European carnivalesque culture and history of literary and dramatic societies, including Savoirs ludiques: Pratiques de divertissement et émergence d'institutions, doctrines et disciplines dans l'Europe moderne, ed. with A.Stroev (2014).

Tatiana Korneeva, Ph.D. (2008) in Classics, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, is Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the ERC-funded project Early Modern Drama and the Cultural Net (“DramaNet”), 2010–2016. She is the author of ‘Alter et ipse’: identità e duplicità nel sistema dei personaggi della Tebaide di Stazio (2011). Her research interests include early modern political thought, the reception of the classical tradition, the history of theatre in comparative perspective (1400–1800), and opera studies. She is currently working on a book about the interaction between political discourse, spectatorship, and the emergent public sphere in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian theatre.

Kirill Ospovat, Ph.D. in Russian Literature, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow (2005), is Research Associate in the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. He has written on eighteenth-century Russian literary and cultural history, primarily focusing on the functioning of literary aesthetics and intellectual disciplines in early modern structures of power, including his forthcoming book Terror and Pity: Aleksandr Sumarokov and the Theater of Power in Elizabethan Russia (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016).