Constructing a Periphery

Abstract

Based on the analysis of articles published in theater periodicals in the Holy Roman Empire, thisstudy explores the enlightened cultural and symbolic geographies as reflected in the late eighteenth-centuryGerman theatrical press. Larry Wolff has shown that western travelers tend to locate the borders of civilizedEurope in Habsburg lands situated east of Vienna, namely in Galicia and Hungary. If theatrical periodicalsand travel memoirs by western travelers share a common interest in the frontiers of civilized Europe, thespecific geography of civilization entails several contradictions in the two medias. Larry Wolff has shownthat western travelers tend to locate the borders of civilized Europe in Habsburg lands situated east ofVienna, namely in Galicia and Hungary. By contrast, in theatrical journals based in the Holy Roman Empire,the borders of civilization seem to be concentrated south-eastwards, along the Ottoman frontier, namely inHungary and in the countries of St. Stephen’s Crown. The article seeks to elucidate variations by pointing togeographical and political factors, as well as to differences between these two literary genres. Unlike traveljournals, theater periodicals in the Holy Roman Empire had to give a general overview of contemporarytheater life, by pointing to the mobilities of itinerant theatrical, especially German, companies, and bydocumenting their repertoire. This article reveals how the specific construction of an imagined Europeanperiphery reflected by the periodicals is determined both by their networks of contributors and by the tastefor exotic, namely Turkish subjects, in eighteenth-century dramas and operas. Hence, such philosophicgeographies are shaped both by the origin, the language, the genre and by the major themes of suchperiodicals.