Download or read book Nineteenth Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter written by Marty Gould and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Gould argues that it was in the imperial capital’s theatrical venues that the public was put into contact with the places and peoples of empire. Plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access to the imperial periphery; separated from the action by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. But without narrative direction of the sort found in novels and travelogues, theatregoers were left to their own interpretive devices, making imperial drama both a powerful and yet uncertain site for the transmission of official imperial ideologies. Nineteenth-century playwrights fed the public’s interest in Britain’s Empire by producing a wide variety of plays set in colonial locales: India, Australia, and—to a lesser extent—Africa. These plays recreated the battles that consolidated Britain’s hold on overseas territories, dramatically depicted western humanitarian intervention in indigenous cultural practices, celebrated images of imperial supremacy, and occasionally criticized the sexual and material excesses that accompanied the processes of empire-building. An active participant in the real-world drama of empire, the Victorian theatre produced popular images that reflected, interrogated, and reinforced imperial policy. Indeed, it was largely through plays and spectacles that the British public vicariously encountered the sights and sounds of the distant imperial periphery. Empire as it was seen on stage was empire as it was popularly known: the repetitions of character types, plot scenarios, and thematic concerns helped forge an idea of empire that, though largely imaginary, entertained, informed, and molded the theatre-going British public.
Download or read book The Performing Century written by T. Davis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at modes of performance and forms of theatre in Nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland. On subjects as varied as the vogue for fairy plays to the representation of economics to the work of a parliamentary committee in regulating theatres, the authors redefine what theatre and performance in the Nineteenth century might be.
Download or read book Theaters of Madness written by Benjamin Reiss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-1800s, a utopian movement to rehabilitate the insane resulted in a wave of publicly funded asylums—many of which became unexpected centers of cultural activity. Housed in magnificent structures with lush grounds, patients participated in theatrical programs, debating societies, literary journals, schools, and religious services. Theaters of Madness explores both the culture these rich offerings fomented and the asylum’s place in the fabric of nineteenth-century life, reanimating a time when the treatment of the insane was a central topic in debates over democracy, freedom, and modernity. Benjamin Reiss explores the creative lives of patients and the cultural demands of their doctors. Their frequently clashing views turned practically all of American culture—from blackface minstrel shows to the works of William Shakespeare—into a battlefield in the war on insanity. Reiss also shows how asylums touched the lives and shaped the writing of key figures, such as Emerson and Poe, who viewed the system alternately as the fulfillment of a democratic ideal and as a kind of medical enslavement. Without neglecting this troubling contradiction, Theaters of Madness prompts us to reflect on what our society can learn from a generation that urgently and creatively tried to solve the problem of mental illness.
Download or read book Spectacles of Reform written by Amy E. Hughes and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-12-17 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth century, long before film and television brought us explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that thrilled audiences, with “sensation scenes” of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing the crucial role that spectacle has played in American activism and how it has remained central to the dramaturgy of reform. Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard with the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how these scenes conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today’s producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet. To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Her book will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century American Women Theatre Managers written by Jane K. Curry and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1994-07-21 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many women held positions of great responsibility and power in the United States during the 19th century as theatre managers: managing stock companies, owning or leasing theatres, hiring actors and other personnel, selecting plays for production, directing rehearsals, supervising all production details, and promoting their dramatic offerings. Competing in risky business ventures, these women were remarkable for defying societal norms that restricted career opportunities for women. The activities of more than 50 such women are discussed in Nineteenth-Century American Women Theatre Managers, beginning with an account of 15 pioneering women managers who were all managing theatres before 24 December 1853, when Catherine Sinclair, often incorrectly identified as the first woman theatre manager in the United States, opened her theatre in San Francisco.
Download or read book The Theatre in Nineteenth Century Spain written by David Thatcher Gies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-08-11 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study of the theatre of nineteenth-century Spain, a most important genre which produced more than 10,000 plays during the course of the century. David Gies assesses this mass of material - much of it hitherto unknown - as text, spectacle, and social phenomenon. His book sheds light on political drama during Napoleonic times, the theatre of dictatorship (1820s), Romanticism, women dramatists, socialist drama, neo-Romantic drama, the relationship between parody and the dominant literary currents of the day, and the challenging work of Galdós. A chapter on the battle to create a National Theatre reveals the deep conflicts generated by the various interested factions in the middle of the century. This readable account will at last allow students and scholars properly to re-evaluate the canon of texts.
Download or read book Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth Century London and New York written by Michael V. Pisani and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds. Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays. The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe. Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.
Download or read book Hernani written by Victor Hugo and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art Vision and Nineteenth Century Realist Drama written by Amy Holzapfel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity’s aggressive interrogation of vision’s residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers—such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton—exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions—including Scribe’s The Glass of Water, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen’s A Doll House, Strindberg’s The Father, and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise—alongside analyses of artwork by major painters and photographers—such as Chardin, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann. In a radical challenge to existing criticism, Holzapfel argues that realism in theatre was never the attempt to reproduce an exact copy of the seen world but rather the struggle to make visible the act of seeing.
Download or read book When Church Became Theatre written by Jeanne Halgren Kilde and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1880s, socio-economic and technological changes in the United States contributed to the rejection of Christian architectural traditions and the development of the radically new auditorium church. Jeanne Kilde links this shift in evangelical Protestant architecture to changes in worship style and religious mission.
Download or read book Parades and Power written by Susan G. Davis and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with a vivid description of Philadelphia's spectacular Washington Centennial of 1832, Susan Davis examines the background of street theatre and the history of parades and public ceremonial culture in Europe and the New World. In pre-Civil War Philadelphia, processions and public ceremonies were popular vehicles for historical commemoration and celebration, and for propaganda and protest.
Download or read book Prefaces to English Nineteenth century Theatre written by Michael R. Booth and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compilation of the prefaces from the author's "English plays of the nineteenth century" (5 vols. ; London : Oxford Univ. Press, 1969-1976) provides an introduction to the critical interpretations of most genres of English drama.
Download or read book Theatre Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth Century America written by John W. Frick and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-07-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre and compares the American genre to its British counterpart.
Download or read book Theater Figures written by Emily Allen and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did nineteenth-century novels return, over again, to the scene of theater? Emily Allen argues that theater provided nineteenth-century novels, novelists, and critics with a generic figure that allowed them to position particular novels and novelistic genres within a complex literary field. Novel genres high and low, male and female, public and private, realistic and romantic, all came to identify themselves within a set of coordinates that included--if only for the purpose of exclusion--the spectacular figure of theater. This figure likewise provided a trope around and against which to construct images of readers and authors, images that most frequently worked to mediate between the supposedly private acts of reading and writing and the very public facts of the print market. In readings of novels by Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Jewsbury, Flaubert, Braddon, and Moore, Allen shows how frequently theater appears as figure in novels of the nineteenth century, and how theater figures--actively and importantly--in what we have come to look back on as the history of the nineteenth-century novel. "Theater Figures thus offers a new model for thinking about how theater helped produce changes in the nineteenth-century literary market. While previous critics have considered theater as an enabling foil for the novel--either a constitutive opposite or constructive ally--Allen demonstrates how theater figures and tropes were used to negotiate competition among the novels and novelists eagerly seeking their share of the literary limelight.
Download or read book The Frightful Stage written by Robert Justin Goldstein and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
Download or read book A History of Italian Theatre written by Joseph Farrell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of Italian theatre from its origins to the the time of this book's publication in 2006. The text discusses the impact of all the elements and figures integral to the collaborative process of theatre-making. The distinctive nature of Italian theatre is expressed in the individual chapters by highly regarded international scholars.
Download or read book Century of Innovation written by Oscar Gross Brockett and published by Allyn & Bacon. This book was released on 1991 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
