Katherine Astbury

I am currently preparing a monograph on Napoleon and Theatre which will provide not just a greater understanding of Napoleonic theatre but also of the cultural history of the era and of the complex interplay of art and politics.

For the last decade I have been working with English Heritage at Portchester Castle in Hampshire to understand better the prisoner-of-war theatre built there and to tell the forgotten stories of the 2000 Black revolutionaries from the Caribbean held there during the Revolutionary decade.

In October 2013 I began an AHRC-funded project on French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era. This project involved a team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers working on linking close textual readings to larger cultural, social and political issues. I produced a critical edition of Pixerécourt's La Forteresse du Danube (1805) for the playwright's complete works being published by Garnier and the team worked on an exhibition about Napoleon's 100 days as well as a volume of papers about the Hundred days and Napoleon's legitimacy (co-edited with Mark Philp).

In 2012 I published a monograph on 'non-political' fiction of the 1790s as a response to the trauma of the Revolution (Narrative Responses to the trauma of the French Revolution (Oxford, Legenda, 2012)). The research has shown how the apparent continuity of Ancien Régime tropes, settings and characters is in fact an indication of writers' traumatised response to the Revolution.

My first book on The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750-1789, examining the development of short fiction in the two countries in the years leading up to the French Revolution, was published by the Voltaire Foundation as SVEC 2002:7. Much of my work is centred on questions of literary history and the thorny problem of literary influence.