Eighteenth-Century Brechtians

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians PDF Author: Joel Schechter
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 0859892085
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Discussing the actor mutiny of 1733, theatre censorship, controversial plays and Fielding’s forgery of an actor’s biography, the book contends that some subversive Augustan and Georgian artists were early Brechtians. Reconstructions of lost episodes in theatre history include a recounting of Fielding’s last days as a stage satirist before his Little Haymarket theatre was closed, Charlotte Charke’s performances as Macheath and Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera and the 1740 staging of Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation on a double bill with Shakespeare’s Merry Wives . . . Some documents in this collection offer another perspective on theatre history by employing fiction – speculative reconstructions of Georgian theatre events for which historical facts are scarce or missing. Brecht also employed fiction to reconsider history in short stories he wrote about Lucullus and Socrates, and a novel about Julius Caesar. The stories and several new letters attributed to Fielding delve into theatre history and keep some of its controversy alive in new ways, historicizing fiction and theatre somewhat as Brecht did. It offers an unconventional, new reading of theatre history, Brecht’s tradition and stage satire.

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians PDF Author: Joel Schechter
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
ISBN: 0859892085
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discussing the actor mutiny of 1733, theatre censorship, controversial plays and Fielding’s forgery of an actor’s biography, the book contends that some subversive Augustan and Georgian artists were early Brechtians. Reconstructions of lost episodes in theatre history include a recounting of Fielding’s last days as a stage satirist before his Little Haymarket theatre was closed, Charlotte Charke’s performances as Macheath and Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera and the 1740 staging of Jonathan Swift’s Polite Conversation on a double bill with Shakespeare’s Merry Wives . . . Some documents in this collection offer another perspective on theatre history by employing fiction – speculative reconstructions of Georgian theatre events for which historical facts are scarce or missing. Brecht also employed fiction to reconsider history in short stories he wrote about Lucullus and Socrates, and a novel about Julius Caesar. The stories and several new letters attributed to Fielding delve into theatre history and keep some of its controversy alive in new ways, historicizing fiction and theatre somewhat as Brecht did. It offers an unconventional, new reading of theatre history, Brecht’s tradition and stage satire.

Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820

Imagining War and Peace in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1690–1820 PDF Author: Andrew Lincoln
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009366556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Is war the opposite of peace, or its necessary accomplice? Exploring this question in relation to eighteenth-century Britain, Andrew Lincoln opens up complex, paradoxical and enduring issues and shows how ideas and methods were developed to provide the British public with moral insulation from violence both overseas and at home.

Teaching Modern British and American Satire

Teaching Modern British and American Satire PDF Author: Evan R. Davis
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

Memory and Enlightenment

Memory and Enlightenment PDF Author: James Ward
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331996710X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book illuminates how the ‘long eighteenth century’ (1660-1800) persists in our present through screen and performance media, writing and visual art. Tracing the afterlives of the period from the 1980s to the present, it argues that these emerging and changing forms stage the period as a point of origin for the grounding of individual identity in personal memory, and as a site of foundational traumas that shape cultural memory.

Early Modern Trauma

Early Modern Trauma PDF Author: Erin Peters
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496227514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
The term trauma refers to a wound or rupture that disorients, causing suffering and fear. Trauma theory has been heavily shaped by responses to modern catastrophes, and as such trauma is often seen as inherently linked to modernity. Yet psychological and cultural trauma as a result of distressing or disturbing experiences is a human phenomenon that has been recorded across time and cultures. The long seventeenth century (1598–1715) has been described as a period of almost continuous warfare, and the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw the development of modern slavery, colonialism, and nationalism, and witnessed plagues, floods, and significant sociopolitical, economic, and religious transformation. In Early Modern Trauma editors Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards present a variety of ways early modern contemporaries understood and narrated their experiences. Studying accounts left by those who experienced extreme events increases our understanding of the contexts in which traumatic experiences have been constructed and interpreted over time and broadens our understanding of trauma theory beyond the contemporary Euro-American context while giving invaluable insights into some of the most pressing issues of today.

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy

The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy PDF Author: Alex Eric Hernandez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192585754
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
The 'rise of the middle class' in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an 'ordinary suffering' proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this 'bourgeois and domestic tragedy' treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed

Brechtian Cinemas

Brechtian Cinemas PDF Author: Nenad Jovanovic
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438463650
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
In Brechtian Cinemas, Nenad Jovanovic uses examples from select major filmmakers to delineate the variety of ways in which Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic/dialectic theatre has been adopted and deployed in international cinema. Jovanovic critically engages Brecht's ideas and their most influential interpretations in film studies, from apparatus theory in the 1970s to the presently dominant cognitivist approach. He then examines a broad body of films, including Brecht's own Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon (1923) and Kuhle Wampe (1932), Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's History Lessons (1972), Peter Watkins's La Commune (2000), and Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013). Jovanovic argues that the role of montage—a principal source of artistic estrangement (Verfremdung) in earlier Brechtian films—has diminished as a result of the technique's conventionalization by today's Hollywood and related industries. Operating as primary agents of Verfremdung in contemporary films inspired by Brecht's view of the world and the arts, Jovanovic claims, are conventions borrowed from the main medium of his expression, theatre. Drawing upon a vast number of sources and disciplines that include cultural, film, literature, and theatre studies, Brechtian Cinemas demonstrates a continued and broad relevance of Brecht for the practice and understanding of cinema.

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment PDF Author: Elizabeth Kraft
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350187720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This volume highlights the variety of forms comedy took in England, with reference to developments in Europe, particularly France, during the European Enlightenment. It argues that comedy in this period is characterized by wit, satire, and humor, provoking both laughter and sympathetic tears. Comic expression in the Enlightenment reflects continuities and engagements with the comedy of previous eras; it is also noted for new forms and preoccupations engendered by the cultural, philosophical, and political concerns of the time, including democratizing revolutions, increasing secularization, and growing emphasis on individualism. Discussions emphasize the period's stage comedy and acknowledge comic expression in various forms of print media including the emerging literary form we now know as the novel. Contributions from scholars reflect a wide variety of interests in the field of 18th-century studies, and the inclusion of a generous number of illustrations throughout demonstrates that the period's visual culture was also an important part of the Enlightenment comic landscape. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to Enlightenment comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 752

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Book Description


Satire

Satire PDF Author: Joel Schechter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350140090
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Satire reconsiders the entertainment, political dissent and comic social commentary created by innovative writers and directors since this theatrical form took the stage in ancient Athens. From Aristophanes to the 18th-century plays of John Gay and Henry Fielding, to the creations of Joan Littlewood, Bertolt Brecht, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erika Mann, Brendan Behan and Dario Fo, practitioners of theatrical satire have prompted audiences to laugh at corruption, greed, injustice and abusive authority. In the theatre these artists jested at prominent citizens, scandals and fashions. In retrospect it can be seen that their topical references, allegories and impersonations also promoted intervention in public discourse and events outside the theatre, as satire extended its reach beyond the stage into society. Satire focuses on three exemplary satiric plays: The Knights by Aristophanes, The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and The Hostage by Brendan Behan under Joan Littlewood's direction. Detailed discussion of these three innovative works reveals both changes and continuities in stage satire over the course of its long, hilarious history. The survey concludes with a discussion of stage satire as an endangered art in need of preservation by actors, directors and theatre historians.