Mourning the comedy of the Grand Siècle, Barbey puts the theater of his time, immoral, mediocre and bourgeois, on trial. The vis comica perishes under the blows of materialism, sentimentalism and joking, three contemporary plagues that sap all the vigor from nineteenth-century comedies. Comic genius does not entirely disappear, however. It resurfaces on stage, in the beauty and nobility of the actors’ performances and in the romanesque genre, where Barbey reinvents the comic and comedy.
CLIL theme: 4027 -- SCIENCES HUMAINES ET SOCIALES, LETTRES -- Lettres et Sciences du langage -- Lettres -- Etudes littéraires générales et thématiques