{"id":526,"date":"2021-01-01T22:56:53","date_gmt":"2021-01-02T05:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/toddlarkin.com\/?p=526"},"modified":"2025-10-26T16:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T22:11:08","slug":"in-search-of-marie-antoinette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/toddlarkin.com\/?p=526","title":{"rendered":"In Search of Marie-Antoinette Book"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Monograph release: Spring 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Now available on amazon.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In Search of Marie-Antoinette in the 1930s: Stefan Zweig, Irving Thalberg, and Norma Shearer <\/em>is a scholarly monograph published by Palgrave Macmillan that follows Austrian biographer Stefan Zweig, American producer Irving Thalberg, and Canadian-American actress Norma Shearer as they attempt to uncover personal aspects of Marie-Antoinette\u2019s life at the French court in the late eighteenth century and to dramatize them in biography, cinema, and performance for public consumption during the 1930s. The first chapter establishes the core subject as an inquiry into the respective contributions of Zweig, Thalberg, and Shearer in formulating an \u201cobjective\u201d or \u201cauthentic\u201d image of \u201cMarie-Antoinette.\u201d The three chapters that follow examine in some detail how Zweig pursued research and drafted the psychological biography at his Salzburg home, Thalberg acquired film rights to the best-selling book and fought the censors to preserve the more sensational aspects of the screenplay at the Culver City studio, and Shearer worked closely with a new producer to give the script a strong romantic angle and to perform the character of the queen on the sound stage. The professionals\u2019 research standards and strategic objectives are weighed in the formulation of a new myth at once sensitive to the historical record and suited to the leisure market. The author\u2019s painstaking research makes it clear that all three protagonists strove for historical precision in their characterizations of the eighteenth-century queen and her court, though with different degrees of self-awareness as shapers of a potent twentieth-century myth of \u201cMarie-Antoinette.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Stefan Zweig, author of the best-selling biography Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman<\/em> (1932), and Claudine West, contributor to the adapted screenplay Marie Antoinette (1934-1936) (Stefan Zweig Center, Salzburg and Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles). <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Table of Contents<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong>: In Search of Marie-Antoinette: The Inscrutable Life Worth Scrutinizing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholarship to Date<\/p>\n\n\n\n