Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre PDF Author: Deborah Vlock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521640848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Dickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this 1998 study, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel-readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Dickens' time: voices of noted actors and actresses and of popular theatrical characters. She uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and reconstructs the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre PDF Author: Deborah Vlock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521640848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this 1998 study, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel-readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Dickens' time: voices of noted actors and actresses and of popular theatrical characters. She uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and reconstructs the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

Dickens's Villains

Dickens's Villains PDF Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199261376
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This study argues that Dickens' villains embody the crucial fusion between the deviant and theatrical aspects of his writing.

Dickens's Style

Dickens's Style PDF Author: Daniel Tyler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Written by leading scholars, this collection of essays offers the first comprehensive and accessible book on Dickens's style.

Theater Figures

Theater Figures PDF Author: Emily Allen
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
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.

Everyone’s Theater

Everyone’s Theater PDF Author: Michael Meeuwis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Nearly all residents of England and its colonies between 1860 and 1914 were active theatergoers, and many participated in the amateur theatricals that defined late Victorian life. The Victorian theater was not an abstract figuration of the world as a stage, but a media system enmeshed in mass lived experience that fulfilled in actuality the concept of a theatergoing nation. Everyone’s Theater turns to local history, the words of everyday Victorians found in their diaries and production records, to recover this lost chapter of theater history in which amateur drama domesticates the stage. Professional actors and playwrights struggled to make their productions compatible with ideas and techniques that could be safely reproduced in the home—and in amateur performances from Canada to India. This became the first true English national theater: a society whose myriad classes found common ground in theatrical display. Everyone’s Theater provides new ways to extend Victorian literature into the dimension of voice, sound, and embodiment, and to appreciate the pleasures of Victorian theatricality.

Dickens' Novels as Poetry

Dickens' Novels as Poetry PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317612884
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Focusing on the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study breaks new ground in reading Dickens’ novels as a unique form of poetry. Dickens’ writing disallows the statement of single unambiguous truths and shows unconscious processes burrowing within language, disrupting received ideas and modes of living. Arguing that Dickens, within nineteenth-century modernity, sees language as always double, Tambling draws on a wide range of Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and what happens in jokes, in caricature, in word-play and punning, and in naming. Working from Dickens’ earliest writings to the latest, deftly combining theory with close analysis of texts, the book examines Dickens’ key novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. It considers Dickens as constructing an urban poetry, alert to language coming from sources beyond the individual, and relating that to the dream-life of characters, who both can and cannot awake to fuller, different consciousness. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Lacan, and Derrida, Tambling shows how Dickens writes a new and comic poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This volume takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to all readers of nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, and more widely, to all readers of literature.

Dickens and the Business of Death

Dickens and the Business of Death PDF Author: Claire Wood
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316241211
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel PDF Author: Lauren Gillingham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009296574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
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.

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust

Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust PDF Author: Ann Gaylin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521815857
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Table of contents

Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press

Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press PDF Author: Will Tattersdill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316539148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In this revisionary study, Will Tattersdill argues against the reductive 'two cultures' model of intellectual discourse by exploring the cultural interactions between literature and science embodied in late nineteenth-century periodical literature, tracing the emergence of the new genre that would become known as 'science fiction'. He examines a range of fictional and non-fictional fin-de-siècle writing around distinct scientific themes: Martian communication, future prediction, X-rays, and polar exploration. Every chapter explores a major work of H. G. Wells, but also presents a wealth of exciting new material drawn from a variety of late Victorian periodicals. Arguing that the publications in which they appeared, as well as the stories themselves, played a crucial part in the development of science fiction, Tattersdill uses the form of the general interest magazine as a way of understanding the relationship between the arts and the sciences, and the creation of a new literary genre.