Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment written by Elizabeth Kraft and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy In the Age of Enlightenment written by Andrew McConnell Stott and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has our expression, use and reception of comedy developed from antiquity to the present day? What role has it occupied in Western culture, and what can it tell us about how society has changed? In a work that spans 2,500 years, these ambitious questions are addressed by 55 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. The volumes describe various manifestations of comedy, its use in religion, theatre and literature, and its historical and philosophical significance. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment written by Mitchell Greenberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period covered by this volume in the Cultural History of Tragedy set is bookended by two shockingly similar historical events: the beheading of a king, Charles I of England in 1649 and Louis XIV of France in 1793. The period between these two dates saw enormous political, social and economic changes that altered European society's cultural life. Tragedy, which had dominated the European stage at the beginning of this period, gradually saw itself replaced by new literary forms, culminating in the gradual decline of theatrical tragedy from the heights it had reached in the 1660s. The dominance of France's military and cultural prestige during this period is reflected in the important, almost exclusive, space dedicated in this volume to the French stage. This book covers the tragedies of France's two greatest playwrights - Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean Racine (1639-99) - which would dominate not only the French stage but, through translations and adaptations, became the model of tragic theater across Europe, finding imitators in England (Dryden), Italy (Alfieri) and as far afield as Russia. This dominance continued well into the 18th century with the triumph of Voltaire's tragedies. This volume also examines how the writings of Diderot and Lessing changed the direction of theatre and how after the Revolution, in the writings of Goethe, Shiller, Hegel, tragedy and the tragic were reimagined and became the sign of European modernity. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire written by Matthew Kaiser and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together contributions from scholars in a range of fields within 19th- and 20th-century cultural, literary, and theater studies, this volume provides a thorough and varied overview of the many forms comedy took in the 19th century. Given the earth-shattering cultural changes and political events that mark the decades between 1800 and 1920-shifting borders, socioeconomic upheaval, scientific and technological innovation, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, unprecedented overseas expansion by European and American imperial powers-it is no wonder that people in the Age of Empire turned to comedy in order to make sense of the contradictions that structure modern identity and navigate the sociocultural fault lines within modern life. Comical, humorous, and satirical cultural artifacts from the period capture the anxieties and aspirations, the petty resentments and lofty ideals, of a world buffeted by change. This volume explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of comedy in the context of blackface minstrelsy, nonsense poetry, music hall and pantomime, comic almanacs and joke books, journalism, silent film, popular novels, and hygiene magazines, among other phenomena. It also provides a detailed account of contentious debates among social Darwinists, psychoanalysts, and political philosophers about the meaning and significance of comedy and laughter to human life. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identity, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight divergent approaches to comedy in the Age of Empire add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age written by Louise Peacock and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing together contributions by scholars from a variety of fields, including theater, film and television, sociology, and visual culture, this volume explores the range and diversity of comedic performance and comic forms in the modern age. It covers a range of forms and examples from 1920 to the present day, including plays, film, television comedy, live comedy, and comedy on social media. It argues that the period covered was marked by an explosion of comic forms and a flowering of comic creativity across a range of media. From the communal watching of silent films at the start of the period, to the use of Twitter and other online platforms to share and comment on comedy, technology has brought about significant changes in its form, consumption, and social effects. As comic forms have shifted and developed, so too have attitudes to what comedy can and cannot do. This study considers its role in entertainment and in provoking consideration of a range of social and political topics. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight different approaches to comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment written by Matthew Senior and published by Berg Publishers. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008 The period of the Enlightenment saw great changes in the way animals were seen. The codifying and categorizing impulse of the age of reason saw sharp lines drawn between different animal species and between animals and humans. In 1600, "beasts" were still seen as the foils and adversaries of human reason. By 1800, animals had become exemplars of sentiment and compassion, the new standards of truth and morals. A new age had dawned, a time when humans admired animals and sought to recover their own animality. A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period and continues with essays on the position of animals in contemporary symbolism, hunting, domestication, sports and entertainment, science, philosophy, and art.

Download or read book Cruelty and Laughter written by Simon Dickie and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.

Download or read book A Cultural History of the Modern Age written by Egon Friedell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume three of A Cultural History of the Modern Age finishes a journey that begins with Descartes in the first volume and ends with Freud and the psychoanalytical movement in the third volume. Friedell describes the contents of these books as a series of performances, starting with the birth of the man of the Modern Age, followed by flowering of this epoch, and concludes with the death of the Modern Age. This huge landscape provides an intertwining of the material and the cultural, the civil and the military, from the high points of creative flowering in Europe to death and emptiness. The themes convey multiple messages: romanticism and liberalism opens the cultural scene, encased in a movement from The Congress of Vienna and its claims of peaceful co-existence to the Franco-German War. The final segment covers the period from Bismarck's generation to World War I. In each instance, the quotidian life of struggle, racial, religious, and social class is seen through the lens of the mighty figures of the period. The works of the period's great figures are shown in the new light of the human search for symbolism, the search for superman, the rise of individualism and decline of history as a source for knowledge. This third volume is painted in dark colors, a foreboding of the world that was to come, of political extremes, and intellectual exaggerations. The author looks forward to a postmodern Europe in which there is a faint glean of light from the other side. What actually appeared was the glare of Nazism and Communism, each claiming the future.

Download or read book Women Experimenting in Theatre written by Kate Aughterson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Modern Age written by Jennifer Wallace and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars come together to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the tragic tradition-updated in performance-still spoke to 20th- and 21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary focus of investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the essays also cover tragic representation-often re-mediated, fragmented and provocatively questioned-in film, art and installation, photography, fiction and creative non-fiction, documentary reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7 news cycles travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are reported across the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries, this volume includes intercultural encounters, various forms of hybridity, and postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Theatre in the Age of Empire written by Peter Marx and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 19th century ushered in an unprecedented boom in technology, the unification of European nations, the building of global empires and stabilization of the middle classes. The theatre of the era reflected these significant developments as well as helped to catalyse them. Populist theatre and purposebuilt playhouses flourished in the ever-growing urban and cosmopolitan centres of Europe and in expanding global networks. This volume provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre from 1800 to 1920. Highly illustrated with 51 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age written by Joanne M. Ferraro and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why marry? The personal question is timeless. Yet the highly emotional desires of men and women during the period between 1450 and 1650 were also circumscribed by external forces that operated within a complex arena of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and religious changes. The period witnessed dramatic religious reforms in the Catholic confession and the introduction of multiple Protestant denominations; the advent of the printing press; European encounters and exchange with the Americas, North Africa, and southwestern and eastern Asia; the growth of state bureaucracies; and a resurgence of ecclesiastical authority in private life. These developments, together with social, religious, and cultural attitudes, including the constructed norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, impinged upon the possibility of marrying. The nine scholars in this volume aim to provide a comprehensive picture of current research on the cultural history of marriage for the years between 1450 and 1650 by identifying both the ideal templates for nuptial unions in prescriptive writings and artistic representation and actual practices in the spheres of courtship and marriage rites, sexual relationships, the formation of family networks, marital dissolution, and the overriding choices of individuals over the structural and cultural constraints of the time. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Anne E. Duggan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How have fairy tales from around the world changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about different cultures and societies? This volume traces the evolution of the genre over the period known as the long eighteenth century. It explores key developments including: the French fairy tale vogue of the 1690s, dominated by women authors including Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy and Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, the fashion of the oriental tale in the early eighteenth century, launched by Antoine Galland's seminal translation of The Thousand and One Nights from Arabic into French, and the birth of European children's literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing together contributions from an international range of scholars in history, literature and cultural studies, this volume examines the intersections between diverse national tale traditions through different critical perspectives, producing an authoritative transnational history of the genre. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of literature, history and cultural studies, this book explores such themes and topics as: forms of the marvelous, adaptation, gender and sexuality, humans and non-humans, monsters and the monstrous, spaces, socialization, and power. A Cultural History of Fairy Tales (6-volume set) A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity is also available as a part of a 6-volume set, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales, tracing fairy tales from antiquity to the present day, available in print, or within a fully-searchable digital library accessible through institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Download or read book Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century written by Chantel Lavoie and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing through Boyhood in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how boyhood was constructed in different creative spaces that reflected the lived experience of young boys through the long eighteenth century—not simply in children’s literature but in novels, poetry, medical advice, criminal broadsides, and automaton exhibitions. The chapters encompass such rituals as breeching, learning to read and write, and going to school. They also consider the lives of boys such as chimney sweeps and convicted criminals, whose bodily labor was considered their only value and who often did not live beyond boyhood. Defined by a variety of tasks, expectations, and objectifications, boys—real, imagined, and sometimes both—were subject to the control of their elders and were used as tools in the cause of civil society, commerce, and empire. This book argues that boys in the long eighteenth century constituted a particular kind of currency, both valuable and expendable—valuable because of gender, expendable because of youth.

Download or read book A Comedian and an Activist Walk into a Bar written by Caty Borum Chattoo and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance written by Bill Maurer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a work that spans 4,500 years, 54 experts chart across six volumes how money has made "the world go round" and capture money's complexities in both substance and form. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole and, to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six."

Download or read book A Cultural History of Theatre written by Jack Clair Watson and published by Addison-Wesley Longman. This book was released on 1993 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, multicultural text presents the history of theater within a framework of cultural and social ideas.