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Playing with dolls in old regime fairy tales / Rori Bloom -- The morality of bilboquet, or the equivocations of language / Jean-Alexandre Perras -- Fiction as play : rhetorical subversion in Lesage's Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane / Zeina Hakim -- Playthings of fortune : lots, games of chance, and inequality in l'Abbé Prévost / Masano Yamashita -- Boundless play and infinite pleasure in the chevalier de Béthune's Relation du monde de Mercure / Erika Mandarino -- The politics of orientalist fantasy in French opera / Katharine Hargrave -- Playing at theater : modes of play in Théâtre de Société / Maria Comsa -- Between play and ritual : profane masquerade in the French Revolution / Annelle Curulla -- The return of play, or the end of revolutionary theater / Yann Robert -- Video games as cultural history : procedural narrative and the eighteenth-century fair theater / Jeffrey Leichman. "Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play-from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself-this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of "play" in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the "Age of Reason," providing ways for its practitioners to consider more "serious" themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds"--
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