Arcadia, a Myth of Modern Times between Renaissance and Enlightenment

The project is a comparative study about the topic of Arcadia including Italian, English and French works composed between the Renaissance and the age of Enlightenment. I should like to show that the freedom of contents of the Arcadian topic corresponds with a freedom of form. Arcadia represents a world outside the established structures of power, intellect and social organization. In the same way the genres associated to the Arcadian world are hybrid, unreal and unfixed. This applies to the Italian `tragicommedia pastorale` by Guarini, to Shakespeare`s late romances, to the French `opera` by Lully-Quinault in the 17. century as well as to Zeno`s and Metastasio`s `libretti` in the 18. century. There always seems to be a normative Arcadian prose text like Sannazzaro`s and Sidney`s Arcadia or D`Urfe`s Astree shaping the notion and the vision of Arcadia which then finds its way into drama. The connotations of pastoral blended into drama depend on the national context and taste and range from magics and rough pastoral in Shakespeare to prerational agnitions and the `voce del sangue` in Metastasio. There is no Arcadian `manual` in the 18. century where instead Arcadia has become a literary current, an organized academy and an alliance of poets and artists willing to live up to the rules of the Arcadian commonwealth. The wish to bring Arcadia down to earth for everybody, according to the egalitarian ideal, seems to be accomplished in Rousseau`s vision of the noble savage. Apart from studying the relation between Arcadia and genre, I will explore its contribution to the theory of gender. The realm of Arcadia seems to be suited to provide the female gender with new functions and a new status. The female heroines are given scope to act and to rule in the name of a `good fate` as opposed to the fate of Renaissance tragedy. Thus I am going to rewrite a chapter of the European Geistesgeschichte bridging the ages of Renaissance and Enlightenment through the Arcadian myth.