Nineteenth Century Theatre

Author : T. Davis
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230589480
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : David Thatcher Gies
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521380464
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Marty Gould
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136740538
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Amy E. Hughes
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472118625
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Michael V. Pisani
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
ISBN 13 : 1609382307
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Benjamin Reiss
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226709655
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Michael R. Booth
Publisher : Manchester University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780719008238
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Kenneth Richards
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317400186
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Nineteenth Century British Theatre written by Kenneth Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1971. Nineteenth-century theatre in England has been greatly neglected, although serious study would reveal that the roots of much modern drama are to be found in the experiments and extravagancies of the nineteenth-century stage. The essays collected here cover a range of topics within the world of Victorian theatre, from particular actors to particular theatres; from farce to Byron’s tragedies, plus a separate section about Shakespearean productions.

Author : Jeanne Halgren Kilde
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780195179729
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.

Author : Amy Holzapfel
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136768432
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

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.