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Description of  Subjects of Affection: Rights of Resistance on the Early Modern French Stage (Rethinking the Early Modern)

Subjects of Affection offers an alternative to the modern model of human rights in an unexpected archive: the monarchist tragedies that shaped Louis XIVs absolutist France. Pairing political theory with performance studies, Anna Rosensweig argues that the right of resistance, largely thought to have disappeared from French political thought in the aftermath of the religious wars of the sixteenth century, actually endured throughout the seventeenth century as a conceptual framework embedded and embodied in tragic drama. Contemporary scholars have critiqued the modern rights paradigm for its failure to acknowledge the ways in which individual rights depend upon state protection and national belonging. Through a reappraisal of early modern French tragedy, Rosensweig provides a corrective to accounts of human rights that begin with the French Revolution, exploring previously unrecognized models for collective action that had emerged during the religious wars. Read more