Download or read book Spectacular Disappearances written by Julia H. Fawcett and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can people in the spotlight control their self-representations when the whole world seems to be watching? The question is familiar, but not new. Julia Fawcett examines the stages, pages, and streets of eighteenth-century London as England's first modern celebrities performed their own strange and spectacular self-representations. They include the enormous wig that actor Colley Cibber donned in his comic role as Lord Foppington--and that later reappeared on the head of Cibber's cross-dressing daughter, Charlotte Charke. They include the black page of Tristram Shandy, a memorial to the parson Yorick (and author Laurence Sterne), a page so full of ink that it cannot be read. And they include the puffs and prologues that David Garrick used to heighten his publicity while protecting his privacy; the epistolary autobiography, modeled on the sentimental novel, of Garrick's protégée George Anne Bellamy; and the elliptical poems and portraits of the poet, actress, and royal courtesan Mary Robinson, a.k.a. Perdita. Linking all of these representations is a quality that Fawcett terms "over-expression," the unique quality that allows celebrities to meet their spectators' demands for disclosure without giving themselves away. Like a spotlight so brilliant it is blinding, these exaggerated but illegible self-representations suggest a new way of understanding some of the key aspects of celebrity culture, both in the eighteenth century and today. They also challenge divides between theatrical character and novelistic character in eighteenth-century studies, or between performance studies and literary studies today. The book provides an indispensable history for scholars and students in celebrity studies, performance studies, and autobiography—and for anyone curious about the origins of the eighteenth-century self.

Download or read book Spectacular Disappearances written by Julia H. Fawcett and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at England's larger-than-life figures in the 18th century shines a spotlight on contemporary celebrity

Download or read book Spectacular Disappearances written by Julia H. Fawcett and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How can the modern individual control his or her self-representation when the whole world seems to be watching? This question is a familiar one amid the the twenty-first century's architecture of 24-hour newsrooms, chat rooms and interrogation rooms, but this book traces this question back to the stages, the pages, and the streets of eighteenth-century London--and to the strange and spectacular self-representations performed there by England's first modern celebrities. These self-representations include the enormous wig that the actor, manager, and playwright Colley Cibber donned in his most famous comic role as Lord Foppington--and that later reappeared on the head of Cibber's cross-dressing daughter, Charlotte Charke. They include the black page of 'Tristram Shandy,' a memorial to the parson Yorick (and his author Laurence Sterne), a page so full of ink that it cannot be read. And they include the puffs and prologues that David Garrick used to hiehgten his publicity while protecting his privacy; the epistolary autobiography, modeled on the sentimental novel, of Garrick's protégée George Anne Bellamy; and the elliptical poems and portraits of the poet, actress, and royal courtesan Mary Robinson, known throughout her life as Perdita. Linking all of these representations is a quality that Fawcett terms ""over-expression."" 'Spectacular Disappearances' theorizes over-expression as the unique quality that allows celebrities to meet their spectators' demands for disclosure without giving themselves away. Like a spotlight so brilliant it is blinding, these exaggerated but illegible self-representations suggest a new way of understanding some of the key aspects of celebrity culture, both in the eighteenth century and today. They also challenge many of the disciplinary divides between theatrical character and novelistic character in eighteenth-century studies, or between performance studies and literary studies today. Drawing on a wide variety of materials and methodologies, 'Spectacular Disappearances' provides an overlooked but indispensable history for scholars and students of celebrity studies, performance studies, and autobiography--as well as to anyone curious about the origins of the eighteenth-century self."

Download or read book Missing People written by Malcolm Cliver and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Stunning Collection Of Missing Persons Cases And Stories Of Missing People And Their Unusual Disappearances People disappear everyday: some of them turn up murdered, some willingly escaped their current lives, while some cases remain to be clouded with mystery. Day by day, we hear and read about missing people, but we take them for granted because none of them are connected to us. For the families of the people who disappeared, they are constantly hoping that the public would care enough if they happen to see a person who resembles their lost loved one. Who knows, perhaps if you were just familiar with the case, you would be able to identify one missing persons? But what happens to these people is mostly unknown. Sure, we speculate but most of the time, we will never really know the truth...

Download or read book Missing Persons written by Victor Ellanos and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stunning Cases Of Unsolved Missing People And Mysterious Missing Persons Cases: The True Stories Every missing persons case is an agonizing experience. The anguish the family has to go through is unimaginable, at least. The life as they know it stops, and stays paused. The only time these people feel alive is when they hear news about their missing loved ones. Everyday, a lot of missing person reports are filed at police stations. Some of them include lost children-- some of them are missing adults. Some are purely by accident, while some have a touch of "malicious" intent as to why the disappearance happened. In this book, we will have a detailed look at six people who have been living a normal life, until they were plucked out from it for unknown reasons. What their families have, up to now, are mere theories. Some of them can already be considered dead, what with the amount years that passed without solid leads. For the cases that have happened recently, their families are still hoping-- living by the belief that one day, they will be united.

Download or read book Mysterious Disappearances written by John Townsend and published by Heinemann-Raintree Library. This book was released on 2004 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title looks at the strange stories of people and objects that have gone without a trace. From the Bermuda Triangle to kidnappings, discover a world of mystery where there are more questions than answers.

Download or read book Weird Disappearances written by Tom McCarthy and published by Nomad Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Virginia Dare was born in Roanoke Colony in 1587, her birth was probably heralded as a new beginning, not just for the tiny baby but for the entire colony. She was the first child of English parents to be born in what English settlers called the “New World.” But three years later, Virginia, her parents, and all other members of the Roanoke colony had disappeared. History is silent about their fate. The story of Virginia Dare and her fellow settlers is a famous one that is still studied and wondered about to this day. Weird Disappearances: Real Tales of Missing People, for readers ages 9 to 12, is a collection of five true tales that examine five moments in history when someone vanished without a trace. Chapters include Virginia Dare, Amelia Earhart, Solomon Northrop, Percy Fawcett, and Anastasia Romanov. These mysterious figures are discussed against the backdrop of historical circumstances, whether it be the carving out of a new world in an ancient culture, the upheaval of the Russian Revolution, or the blazing of a new trail high in the skies. Weird Disappearances is the fourth book in a new series called Mystery & Mayhem, which features true tales that whet kids’ appetites for history by engaging them in genres with proven track records—mystery and adventure. History is made of near misses, unexplained disappearances, unsolved mysteries, and bizarre events that are almost too weird to be true—almost! The Mystery & Mayhem series delves into these tidbits of history to provide kids with a jumping off point into a lifelong habit of appreciating history. Each of the five true tales told within Weird Disappearances is paired with a map, as well as fun facts about the setting, industry, and time period. A glossary and resources page provide the opportunity to practice using essential academic tools. These nonfiction narratives use clear, concise language with compelling plots that both avid and reluctant readers will be drawn to.

Download or read book Carrying All before Her written by Chelsea Phillips and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.

Download or read book Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth Century Theatrical Biography written by Amanda Weldy Boyd and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography” examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies’ 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre’s history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin’s story at the turn of the century and James Boaden’s theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work’s predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or “scrapbooked” editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer’s authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to “co-author” biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.

Download or read book A General History of Horology written by Turner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-02 with total page 777 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A General History of Horology describes instruments used for the finding and measurement of time from Antiquity to the 21st century. In geographical scope it ranges from East Asia to the Americas. The instruments described are set in their technical and social contexts, and there is also discussion of the literature, the historiography and the collecting of the subject. The book features the use of case studies to represent larger topics that cannot be completely covered in a single book. The international body of authors have endeavoured to offer a fully world-wide survey accessible to students, historians, collectors, and the general reader, based on a firm understanding of the technical basis of the subject. At the same time as the work offers a synthesis of current knowledge of the subject, it also incorporates the results of some fundamamental, new and original research.

Download or read book Making Stars written by Nora Nachumi and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In bringing biography and celebrity together, the essays in Making Stars interrogate contemporary and current understandings of each. Although biography was not invented in the eighteenth century, the period saw the emergence of works that focus on individuals who are interesting as much, if not more, for their everyday, lived experience than for their status or actions. At the same time, celebrity emerged as public fascination for the private lives of publicly visible individuals. Biography and celebrity are mutually constitutive, but in complex and varied ways that this volume unpacks. Contributors to this volume present us a picture of eighteenth-century celebrity that was mediated across multiple sites, demonstrating that eighteenth-century celebrity culture in Britain was more pervasive, diverse and, in many ways, more egalitarian, than previously supposed.

Download or read book Billy Waters Is Dancing written by Mary L. Shannon and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of William Waters, Black street performer in Regency London, and how his huge celebrity took on a life of its own Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated "King of the Beggars." Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London's most famous street performer. His extravagantly costumed image blazed across the stage and in print to an unprecedented degree. For all his contemporary renown, Waters died destitute in 1823--but his legend would live on for decades. Mary L. Shannon's biography draws together surviving traces of Waters' life to bring us closer to the historical figure underlying them. Considering Waters' influence on the London stage and his echoing resonances in visual art, and writing by Douglass, Dickens, and Thackeray, Shannon asks us to reconsider Black presences in nineteenth-century popular culture. This is a vital attempt to recover a life from historical obscurity--and a fascinating account of what it meant to find fame in the Regency metropolis.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss written by Emily Hodgson Anderson and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-03-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David Garrick, struggled with these questions through their reenactments of Shakespearean plays. For these artists, the resurgence of Shakespeare, a playwright whose works just decades earlier had nearly been erased, represented their own chance for eternal life. Despite the ephemeral nature of performance, Garrick and company would find a way to make Shakespeare, and through him the actor, rise again. In chapters featuring Othello, Richard III, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and The Merchant of Venice, Emily Hodgson Anderson illuminates how Garrick’s performances of Shakespeare came to offer his contemporaries an alternative and even an antidote to the commemoration associated with the monument, the portrait, and the printed text. The first account to read 18th-century visual and textual references to Shakespeare alongside the performance history of his plays, this innovative study sheds new light on how we experience performance, and why we gravitate toward an art, and artists, we know will disappear.

Download or read book Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth Century British Novel written by Lauren Gillingham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representation of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain, Lauren Gillingham offers a revisionist history of the novel. With particular attention to the fiction of the 1820s through 1840s, this study focuses on novels that use fashion's idiom of currency and obsolescence to link narrative form to a heightened sense of the present and the visibility of public life. It contends that novelists steeped their fiction in date-stamped matters of dress, manners, and media sensations to articulate a sense of history as unfolding not in epochal change, but in transient issues and interests capturing the public's imagination. Reading fiction by Mary Shelley, Letitia Landon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, W. H. Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and others, Fashionable Fictions tells the story of a nineteenth-century genre commitment to contemporaneity that restyles the novel itself.

Download or read book Charles Macklin and the Theatres of London written by Ian Newman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Macklin (1699?–1797) was one of the most important figures in the eighteenth-century theatre. Born in Ireland, he began acting in London in around 1725 and gave his final performance in 1789 – no other actor can claim to have acted across seven decades of the century, from the reign of George I to the Regency Crisis of 1788. He is credited alongside Garrick with the development of the natural school of acting and gave a famous performance of Shylock that gave George II nightmares. As a dramatist, he wrote one of the great comic pieces of the mid-century (Love à la Mode, 1759), as well as the only play of the century to be twice refused a performance licence (The Man of the World, 1781). He opened an experimental coffeehouse in Covent Garden, he advocated energetically for actors’ rights and copyright reform for dramatists, and he successfully sued theatre rioters. In short, he had an astonishingly varied career. With essays by leading experts on eighteenth-century culture, this volume provides a sustained critical examination of his career, illuminating many aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical culture and of the European Enlightenment, and explores the scholarly benefit – and thrill – of restaging Macklin’s work in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Publicity and the Early Modern Stage written by Allison K. Deutermann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did publicity look like before the eighteenth century? What were its uses and effects, and around whom was it organized? The essays in this collection ask these questions of early modern London. Together, they argue that commercial theater was a vital engine in celebrity’s production. The men and women associated with playing—not just actors and authors, but playgoers, characters, and the extraordinary local figures adjunct to playhouse productions—introduced new ways of thinking about the function and meaning of fame in the period; about the networks of communication through which it spread; and about theatrical publics. Drawing on the insights of Habermasean public sphere theory and on the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies, Publicity and the Early Modern Stage introduces a new and comprehensive look at early modern theories and experiences of publicity.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-17 with total page 785 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Lord Byron offers the latest in critical thinking about the poet that defined the Romantic era across Europe and beyond. The volume presents forty-four groundbreaking essays that enable readers to assess Lord Byron's central position in Romantic traditions and his profound and far-reaching influence on British, European, and world culture. The chapters are organized into five sections-'Works', 'Biographical Contexts', 'Literary and Cultural Contexts', 'Afterlives', and 'Reading Byron Now'-that guide readers through the most important issues and frameworks for interpreting Byron. 'Works' presents original readings of Byron's key works and many of his lesser-known ones, giving space to extensive studies of his great epic, Don Juan, and the poem that brought him fame, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 'Biographical Contexts' invites readers to consider Byron's life through key themes and patterns. 'Literary and Cultural Contexts' sets out the most important intellectual traditions from which Byron's work emerged and in which it developed. 'Afterlives' shows readers the extent of Byron's influence on literature, art, music, and politics in Europe and beyond. 'Reading Byron Now' advances the critical agendas that are shaping Byron Studies today. The Handbook tackles key themes associated with Byron including the Byronic Hero, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, sexuality, mobility, scepticism, the Gothic, celebrity culture, and much more. For new readers of Byron, the volume provides an excellent grounding in his life and work, and for specialists, it opens up exciting new approaches to an icon of Romantic literature.