Dramatic Experience: Poetics of Drama and the Public Sphere(s) in Early Modern Europe and Beyond

From Aristotle to New Historicism, theoretical discussions have recognized drama as a medium tailored to produce and manipulate collective emotions in order to obtain desired aesthetic, social, and political effects. Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public
Sphere(s) (ed. by Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat) explores the convergence of dramatic theory, theatrical practice, and various modes of audience experience — among both theatregoers and readers of drama — which contributed between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries to the emergence of symbolic, social, and cultural space(s) we call ‘public sphere(s)’. Developing on a post-Habermasian understanding of this notion, the essays in this collection demonstrate that related, if diverging, conceptions and forms of the ‘public’ existed in a variety of locations, and cultures across early modern Europe — and in Asia.