Kostümierung der Geschlechter

In her book, based on a Viennese Habilitation and published as a supplementary volume to the journal Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert , Beate Hochholdinger-Reiterer examines theatre history in the German Enlightenment from a Gender Studies perspective. In the eighteenth century, theatre was arguably the most significant mass medium and ‘moral institution’ for the formation of a bourgeois and enlightened habitus. Hochholdinger-Reiterer describes the central developments of theatre in that era as a process of cleansing and disciplining that not only expelled coarse Hanswurst figures, baroque grandiloquence and courtly stiltedness from the stage, but also excluded from theatrical discourses behaviour codified as feminine and women as protagonists. She traces this purifying and exclusionary process at various levels central to the theatre of the Enlightenment, such as the national theatrical discourse, which succeeded in the advancing theorization of acting as an ‘art form’, and poetological concepts such as the theatre of illusion and the realistic-psychological method of (re)presentation.

Art · Bourgeoisie · Enlightenment · Insider · Literature · Political science · Politics · Theology · Arts, Culture, and Music Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Law · Philosophy