Early Modern Theatricality

Early Modern Theatricality PDF Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

Early Modern Theatricality

Early Modern Theatricality PDF Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Get Book Here

Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China

The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China PDF Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England

Performance and Religion in Early Modern England PDF Author: Matthew J. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268104689
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.

Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland

Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland PDF Author: Mr John J McGavin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409489779
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland analyses narrative accounts of public theatricality in late medieval and early-modern Scottish culture (pre-1645). Literary texts such as journal, memoir and chronicles reveal a complex spectatorship in which eye witness, textual witness and the imagination interconnect. The narrators represent a broad variety of public actions as theatrical: included are instances of assault and assassination, petition, clerical interrogation, dissent, preaching, play and display, the performance of identity and the spectatorship of tourism. Varying influences of personal experience, oral tradition, and existing written record colour the narratives. Discernible also are those rhetorical and generic forms which witnesses employ to give a comprehensible shape to events. Narratives of theatricality prove central for understanding early Scottish culture since they record moments of contact between those in power and those without it; they show how participants aimed to influence both present spectators and the witness of history; they reveal the contested nature of ambiguous public genres, and they point up the pleasures and responsibilities of spectatorship. McGavin demonstrates that early Scottish culture is revealed as much in its processes of witnessing as in that which it claims to witness. Although the book's emphasis is on the early modern period, its study of chronicle narratives takes it back from the period of their composition (predominantly 15th and 16th century) to earlier medieval events.

How the World Became a Stage

How the World Became a Stage PDF Author: William Egginton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487717
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.

Shakespeare's Double Helix

Shakespeare's Double Helix PDF Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
English literature.

Theatrical Milton

Theatrical Milton PDF Author: Brendan Prawdzik
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474421024
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Theatrical Milton brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, 'theatricality' identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre. Political and theological cultures in seventeenth-century England developed a treasury of representational resources in order to stage-to satirize and, above all, to de-legitimate-rhetors of politics, religion, and print. At the core of Milton's works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. This book changes the terms of scholarly discussion and discovers how the social structures of theatre afforded Milton resources for poetic and polemical representation and uncovers the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and drama.

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England

Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England PDF Author: Claire M. L. Bourne
Publisher:
ISBN: 019884879X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Explores typographic display and experimentation in printed play-texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and interprets features of page display (particularly special characters, scene division, punctuation, and illustration) as a means of communicating and expressing aspects of dramatic performance to readers.

Law as Performance

Law as Performance PDF Author: Julie Stone Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192653598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage

Disguise on the Early Modern English Stage PDF Author: Professor Peter Hyland
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409478777
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Disguise devices figure in many early modern English plays, and an examination of them clearly affords an important reflection on the growth of early theatre as well as on important aspects of the developing nation. In this study Peter Hyland considers a range of practical issues related to the performance of disguise. He goes on to examine various conceptual issues that provide a background to theatrical disguise (the relation of self and "other", the meaning of mask and performance). He looks at many disguise plays under three broad headings. He considers moral issues (the almost universal association of disguise with "evil"); social issues (sumptuary legislation, clothing, and the theatre, and constructions of class, gender and national or racial identity); and aesthetic issues (disguise as an emblem of theatre, and the significance of disguise for the dramatic artist). The study serves to examine the significant ways in which disguise devices have been used in early modern drama in England.