Download or read book Modes of Play in Eighteenth Century France written by Fayçal Falaky and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.
Download or read book Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century written by Tanya M. Caldwell and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.
Download or read book Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth Century English Theater written by Deborah Payne Fisk and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging in approach from feminist to historicist, the eleven essays in this collection share the culturalist premise that the drama of late Stuart and early Georgian England helped to constitute the dominant ideology of the period. The contributors' varied approaches allow for the reconsideration of libertinism, the politics of sexual desire, and other classic issues, as well as such newer concerns as the social construction of the first English actresses, empiricism as an emergent epistemological discourse, cultural anxiety about novelty and repetition, and shifting tropes of inherent worth. By reading well-known works in unexpected ways and focusing on less frequently studied dramatists, from Sedley, Motteux, Pix, and Behn to Manley, Trotter, and Shadwell, the contributors also test the limits of the canon. In addition, they suggest that earlier critical perceptions, perhaps even more than the “innate worth” of the plays, determined the shape of the canon. These essays present a different image of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater, one that reveals how the drama was a site as important for the negotiation of cultural meaning as were novels and verse satires.
Download or read book Female Playwrights and Eighteenth Century Comedy written by M. Anderson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-02-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four female playwrights in England with multiple comic successes from 1670-1800. Behn's interest in the body, Centlivre's fascination with written contracts, Cowley's nationalism, and Inchbald's discussion of divorce emerge in the comic events that are animated by the psychological mechanisms of humor. Attending to the dialogue between these comic events and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.
Download or read book Rival Queens written by Felicity Nussbaum and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In eighteenth-century England, actresses were frequently dismissed as mere prostitutes trading on their sexual power rather than their talents. Yet they were, Felicity Nussbaum argues, central to the success of a newly commercial theater. Urban, recently moneyed, and thoroughly engaged with their audiences, celebrated actresses were among the first women to achieve social mobility, cultural authority, and financial independence. In fact, Nussbaum contends, the eighteenth century might well be called the "age of the actress" in the British theater, given women's influence on the dramatic repertory and, through it, on the definition of femininity. Treating individual star actresses who helped spark a cult of celebrity—especially Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, Catherine Clive, Margaret Woffington, Frances Abington, and George Anne Bellamy—Rival Queens reveals the way these women animated issues of national identity, property, patronage, and fashion in the context of their dramatic performances. Actresses intentionally heightened their commercial appeal by catapulting the rivalries among themselves to center stage. They also boldly challenged in importance the actor-managers who have long dominated eighteenth-century theater history and criticism. Felicity Nussbaum combines an emphasis on the actresses themselves with close analysis of their diverse roles in works by major playwrights, including George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, Colley Cibber, Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Richard Sheridan. Hers is a comprehensive and original argument about the importance of actresses as the first modern subjects, actively shaping their public identities to make themselves into celebrated properties.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Women Dramatists written by Mary Pix and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-13 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 2001"--T.p
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Authorship and the Play of Fiction written by Emily Hodgson Anderson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study looks at developments in eighteenth-century drama that influenced the rise of the novel; it begins by asking why women writers of this period experimented so frequently with both novels and plays. Here, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen explore theatrical frames--from the playhouse, to the social conventions of masquerade, to the fictional frame of the novel itself—that encourage audiences to dismiss what they contain as feigned. Yet such frames also, as a result, create a safe space for self-expression. These authors explore such payoffs both within their work—through descriptions of heroines who disguise themselves to express themselves—and through it. Reading the act of authorship as itself a form of performance, Anderson contextualizes the convention of fictionality that accompanied the development of the novel; she notes that as the novel, like the theater of the earlier eighteenth century, came to highlight its fabricated nature, authors could use it as a covert yet cathartic space. Fiction for these authors, like theatrical performance for the actor, thus functions as an act of both disclosure and disguise—or finally presents self-expression as the ability to oscillate between the two, in "the play of fiction."
Download or read book The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth Century Drama written by Kristina Straub and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 1547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama brings together the work of key playwrights from 1660 to 1800, divided into three main sections: Restoring the Theatre: 1660–1700 Managing Entertainment: 1700–1760 Entertainment in an Age of Revolutions: 1760–1800 Each of the 20 plays featured is accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions. Taking in the spectrum of this period’s dramatic landscape—from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners to ballad opera and gothic spectacle—The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is an essential resource for students and teachers alike.
Download or read book Fictions of Presence written by Rosalind Ballaster and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.
Download or read book Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests written by David J. Buch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on hundreds of operas, singspiels, ballets, and plays with supernatural themes, Magic Flutes and Enchanted Forests argues that the tension between fantasy and Enlightenment-era rationality shaped some of the most important works of eighteenth-century musical theater and profoundly influenced how audiences and critics responded to them. David J. Buch reveals that despite—and perhaps even because of—their fundamental irrationality, fantastic and exotic themes acquired extraordinary force and popularity during the period, pervading theatrical works with music in the French, German, and Italian mainstream. Considering prominent compositions by Gluck, Rameau, and Haydn, as well as many seminal contributions by lesser-known artists, Buch locates the origins of these magical elements in such historical sources as ancient mythology, European fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, and the occult. He concludes with a brilliant excavation of the supernatural roots of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Don Giovanni, building a new foundation for our understanding of the magical themes that proliferated in Mozart’s wake.
Download or read book The West Indian written by Cumberland and published by . This book was released on 1774 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Character s Theater written by Lisa A. Freeman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind," Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.
Download or read book English Drama written by Richard W. Bevis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-06 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the causes of Restoration drama's licentiousness? How did the elegantly-turned comedy of Congreve become the pointed satire of Fielding? And how did Sheridan and Goldsmith reshape the materials they inherited? In the first account of the entire period for more than a decade, Richard Bevis argues that none of these questions can be answered without an understanding of Augustan and Georgian history. The years between 1660 and 1789 saw considerable political and social upheaval, which is reflected in the eclectic array of dramatic forms that is Georgian theatre's essential characteristic.
Download or read book Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century written by Akihiro Odanaka and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bunraku has fascinated theatre practitioners through its particular forms of staging, such as highly elaborated manipulation of puppets and exquisite coordination of chanters and shamisen players. However, Bunraku lacks scholarship dedicated to translating not only the language but also cultural barriers of this work. In this book, Odanaka and Iwai tackle the wealth of bunraku plays underrepresented in English through rexamining their siginifcance on a global scale. Little is written on the fact that bunraku theatre, despites its elegant figures of puppets and exotic stories, was often made as a place to manifest the political concerns of playwrights in the 18th century, hence a reflection of the audience's expectation that could not have materialized outside the theatre. Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century aims to make bunraku texts readable for those who are interested in the political and cultural implications of this revered theatre tradition.
Download or read book Ireland Enlightenment and the English Stage 1740 1820 written by David O'Shaughnessy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the contribution of Irish writers to the Georgian English stage; argues that theatre is an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.
Download or read book Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century written by Tanya M. Caldwell and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.
Download or read book Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century written by Fiona Ritchie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.
