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Special Issue 30: War And Truce In Early Modern European Culture: Negotiating Appeasement And Entente
No. 30 (2022)Special Issue, edited by Agnès Lafont & Nathalie Rivère de Carles.
This special issue focuses on the material and fictional forms of a diplomacy of truce and appeasement on the European political and literary stage at large. The articles address England, Scotland, France and Spain and concentrate on the agents favouring moments of truce and more broadly participating in the appeasement of political, economic or religious conflicts. They focus on non-official (non-governmental) agents and their methods to foster agreements between new or old foes. Besides the historical analysis of truce and negotiation, the issue emphasises the role of a poetics of truce in literature as means to re-/create an entente between adversaries.
Thus, the articles question the aesthetic and ethical principles behind real and fictional negotiators. They examine how artists and their works participate in peace-brokering or in fostering agreements and to what extent they offer functional models for political action and thought. The articles probe appeasement as a mode of writing and as a mode of composition. They also analyse the literary and artistic means used to favour agreements: characterisation, new uses of exemplary figures, translation (sources, adaptation, paratextual material and diffusion).
Not limited to the geopolitical sphere, this special issue wishes to extend the reflection on the agency of truce in political and theological negotiations to other sociological and cultural tensions. The articles then engage with a specific controversy, the Querelle des femmes, or the so-called woman question, in order to explore how literary figures and models of agreement are recreated and adapted from previously conflicting figures. It deals with the identities of the historical and literary figures implementing these forms of diplomacy and with their theatre of operation (literary and epistolary writings, drama, patronage networks, manuscript) and with their tactics of de-escalation and strategies of entente.
