Ethics and the Theory of Comedy in France and Britain, 1660 to 1800

Three 20-minute papers are sought for a panel on the place of ethics in
British and French theories of comedy during the long
eighteenth-century. While earlier interpretations of Aristotle's Poetics
provided a basis for the period's discussions of tragedy's moral force,
critics interested in the ethical value of comedy could appeal to no
equivalent tradition or founding text. Thus, from the prefaces of
Molière and Shadwell, through the polemics of Bossuet and Collier, to
the essays of Diderot, Beaumarchais, and Goldsmith, comedy was variously
depicted as a corrupter of morality, as an ethically neutral diversion,
or as a corrective of ethically questionable behavior. Papers on these
critical debates, on individual theoretical positions, or on related
theatrical practices are welcome, as are treatments of French, British,
and comparative topics.

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Atlanta, Georgia, March
22-25, 2007.

Please e-mail proposals and brief CVs to Robert Dimit at
robert.dimit_at_nyu.edu no later than September 15. Please include your
telephone and fax numbers, and let me know if you will need any
audio-visual equipment.

The Society's rules permit members to present only one paper at the
meeting. Members may, in addition to presenting a paper, serve as a
session chair, a respondent, or a panel discussant, but they may not
present a paper in those sessions they also chair.

All participants must be members in good standing of ASECS or a
constituent society of ISECS. Membership must be current as of December
1 in order to receive pre-registration materials. Those members of
constituent societies of ISECS MUST furnish a snail mail address to
asecs_at_wfu.edu to receive pre-registration materials.

For more information, please see
http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/2007annualmtg.htm.

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Received on Fri Aug 11 2006 - 15:28:08 EDT