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.
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.
Author: Matthew J. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268104689
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 509
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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.
Author: John J. McGavin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754607946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
John McGavin here analyses narrative accounts of public theatricality in late medieval and early modern Scottish culture (pre-1645). He shows that journals, memoirs and chronicles record events which were often ambiguous in genre, confrontational in action and aimed at both present and future 'spectators'. McGavin demonstrates that early Scottish culture is revealed as much in its processes of witnessing as in that which it claims to witness.
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.
Author: Brendan Prawdzik
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474421024
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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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.
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.
Author: Jan Bloemendal
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004236996
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
Early modern theatre was a visual matter, even though the authors wrote plays which were mainly meant to be read. But whether they wrote their plays to have them performed or not, authors could use comedies, tragi-comedies or tragedies to influence public opinion, to make a statement in a debate, or to convey explicit or implicit lessons that they carried out or had carried out by linguistic, rhetorical and theatrical means. How explicit they were in expressing their views depended on the characters of the authors or the circumstances in which they wrote. Questions regarding the opinion-forming and opinion-following functions of theatre, the means by which authors and theatre makers expressed their ideas, and the role of theatre and plays in public debate are discussed from various angles. Such questions refer not only to ‘literary’ plays, but also to other forms of theatrical event, such as royal entrances. Contributors include: Imre Bésanger, Hartmut Beyer, Stijn Bussels, Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, Verena Demoed, Arjan van Dixhoorn, Ron Gruijters, Jelle Koopmans, Frans-Willem Korsten, Katell Lavéant, Hubert Meeus, Marco Prandoni, and Helmar Schramm.
Author: Ronald Bedford
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Why, and in what ways, did late medieval and early modern English people write about themselves, and what was their understanding of how "selves" were made and discussed? This collection goes to the heart of current debate about literature and autobiography, addressing the contentious issues of what is meant by early modern autobiographical writing, how it was done, and what was understood by self-representation in a society whose groupings were both elaborate and highly regulated. Early Modern Autobiography considers the many ways in which autobiographical selves emerged from the late medieval period through the seventeenth century, with the aim of understanding the interaction between those individuals' lives and their worlds, the ways in which they could be recorded, and the contexts in which they are read. In addressing this historical arc, the volume develops new readings of significant autobiographical works, while also suggesting the importance of texts and contexts that have rarely been analyzed in detail, enabling the contributors to reflect on, and challenge, some prevailing ideas about what it means to write autobiographically and about the development of notions of self-representation. "The idea of the self, as seen from diverse and fascinating perspectives on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century life: this is what readers can expect from Early Modern Autobiography. A beautifully edited collection, genuinely far-reaching and insightful, Early Modern Autobiography makes known to us a great deal about how people saw themselves four hundred years ago." --Derek Cohen, Professor of English, McLaughlin College, York University "Acutely addressing a range of central issues from subjectivity to theatricality to religion, these essays will be of great interest to specialists in early modern studies and students of autobiographical writings from all eras." --Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin "The essays in this volume show where archival discoveries--memoirs, letters, account books, wills, and marginalia--can take us in understanding early modern mentalities. They document the interdependence of the abstract and the everyday, the social constructedness of self-awareness, local contexts for self-recordation, and impulses that range from legal purpose to imaginative escape. The sixteen chapters open many fascinating new perspectives on identity and personhood in Renaissance England."--Lena Cowen Orlin, Executive Director, The Shakespeare Association of America and Professor of English, University of Maryland Baltimore County Ronald Bedford is Reader in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at the Unversity of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, and author of The Defence of Truth: Herbert of Cherbury and the Seventeenth Century and Dialogues with Convention: Readings in Renaissance Poetry. The late Lloyd Davis was Reader in the School of English at the University of Queensland, and author of Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterization in the English Renaissance (1993) and editor of Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance (1998) and Shakespeare Matters: History, Teaching, Performance (2003). Philippa Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales, and has published widely in the areas of Shakespeare studies, cultural studies, feminism, and postcolonial studies.
Author: Julie Stone Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898493
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.
