Romantic Ideology Unmasked

Romantic Ideology Unmasked PDF Author: Marjean D. Purinton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Romantic drama is politically charged and ideologically based. The plays mediate economic issues, gender relations, class struggles, family dissolutions, political revolutions, and religious skepticism. By unmasking the embedded layers of ideology and revealing the various fictions that ideology perpetrates as truths, Romantic Ideology Unmasked reveals the mental processes on which romantic drama's temporal and spatial issues - both historical and social - rest. The meaning of the drama thus lies in the variety of tyrannies they symbolize, or inscribe. Readers actively participate in the process engendered by the plays: they unmask the ideology operating at their foundations by revealing the obvious and submerged constraints on mental freedom." "In William Wordsworth's The Borderers, political tyranny and the ideology of revolution, specifically spawned by the French in 1789, are privileged above the other embedded layers of tyrannies and historically based revolutions, including the Barons' Revolt of 1258 and the English Civil War. Both play and prose radically question the ideology that prompts the revolution-restoration cycle, a delusional and entrapping process." "Lord Byron's Manfred and Werner explore tyrannies engendered by familial and social conflicts as they criticize reforms instigated in Regency England. While Manfred confirms that it is not difficult to extirpate the curses and inheritances of the past once humankind is freed from the mental tyrannies it inflicts upon itself, Werner reveals the horrors of enslavement to class, name, race, and title - all inheritances humanly contrived to enslave others." "Religious and political tyranny are blatant in Percy Shelley's The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound. These plays also expose an ideology based on bifurcated thinking, uncontested and unchanged, which undermines any efforts at social and moral reform. The Cenci dramatically portrays an aristocratic family and an Italian Renaissance society enslaved in the tragedies produced by an ideology of dichotomous thinking. Prometheus Unbound offers a presentation of liberation from such an enslaving ideology." "Character rivalries and political intrigue in Joanna Baillie's Count Basil and De Monfort dramatize a study in early-nineteenth-century gender relations and female emancipation. Baillie's dramas question a mental structuration that accepts as absolute and fixed truth a gender relationship that exists oppositionally. The plays demonstrate the mental forms of oppression to which women were subjected and from which material forms of economic and physical constraints emanated." "Romantic writers transpose ideological struggles into dramatic and political terms, rendering mediations of the same collective mentality, the same social structure in different interpretive frames. In considering romantic drama as a collective and mental process, we liberate the interpretive possibilities the plays offer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Romantic Ideology Unmasked

Romantic Ideology Unmasked PDF Author: Marjean D. Purinton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Romantic drama is politically charged and ideologically based. The plays mediate economic issues, gender relations, class struggles, family dissolutions, political revolutions, and religious skepticism. By unmasking the embedded layers of ideology and revealing the various fictions that ideology perpetrates as truths, Romantic Ideology Unmasked reveals the mental processes on which romantic drama's temporal and spatial issues - both historical and social - rest. The meaning of the drama thus lies in the variety of tyrannies they symbolize, or inscribe. Readers actively participate in the process engendered by the plays: they unmask the ideology operating at their foundations by revealing the obvious and submerged constraints on mental freedom." "In William Wordsworth's The Borderers, political tyranny and the ideology of revolution, specifically spawned by the French in 1789, are privileged above the other embedded layers of tyrannies and historically based revolutions, including the Barons' Revolt of 1258 and the English Civil War. Both play and prose radically question the ideology that prompts the revolution-restoration cycle, a delusional and entrapping process." "Lord Byron's Manfred and Werner explore tyrannies engendered by familial and social conflicts as they criticize reforms instigated in Regency England. While Manfred confirms that it is not difficult to extirpate the curses and inheritances of the past once humankind is freed from the mental tyrannies it inflicts upon itself, Werner reveals the horrors of enslavement to class, name, race, and title - all inheritances humanly contrived to enslave others." "Religious and political tyranny are blatant in Percy Shelley's The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound. These plays also expose an ideology based on bifurcated thinking, uncontested and unchanged, which undermines any efforts at social and moral reform. The Cenci dramatically portrays an aristocratic family and an Italian Renaissance society enslaved in the tragedies produced by an ideology of dichotomous thinking. Prometheus Unbound offers a presentation of liberation from such an enslaving ideology." "Character rivalries and political intrigue in Joanna Baillie's Count Basil and De Monfort dramatize a study in early-nineteenth-century gender relations and female emancipation. Baillie's dramas question a mental structuration that accepts as absolute and fixed truth a gender relationship that exists oppositionally. The plays demonstrate the mental forms of oppression to which women were subjected and from which material forms of economic and physical constraints emanated." "Romantic writers transpose ideological struggles into dramatic and political terms, rendering mediations of the same collective mentality, the same social structure in different interpretive frames. In considering romantic drama as a collective and mental process, we liberate the interpretive possibilities the plays offer."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism

The Art of Recollection in Jena Romanticism PDF Author: Laurie Ruth Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110910543
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study examines the ways in which memory is understood and aestheticized in Romantic texts, and argues that these works reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which modern thought is constructed. The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations. This belief results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Romantics associate with memory. The book includes a survey of theories of memory and how they contribute to a specifically Romantic model for memory that can lead to new interpretations of Romantic fragments; chapters on eighteenth-century aesthetic and psychological theories of memory that precede and influence Romantic texts, and on understandings of memory in critical and idealist philosophy; interpretations of the poetic and philosophical production of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; and a conclusion that demonstrates the persistence of the Romantic model for memory in contemporary memory theory and cultural production.

Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism

Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism PDF Author: Joseph M. Ortiz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135190079X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Get Book Here

Book Description
The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism

The Languages of Performance in British Romanticism PDF Author: Lilla Maria Crisafulli
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039110971
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents a selection of essays by established Italian and international scholars in the field of Romantic drama. It is divided into four main sections: 1) Dramatic Theory and Practice; 2) On the Romantic Stage: History, Arts, and Acting; 3) Interaction of Genres: from Fiction to Drama; 4) The Romantics' Debate on Theatre and Drama: a Selected Anthology. The crucial area of debate these essays address is the way in which the problem of the dramatic representation of the self becomes in Romantic drama the very centre of reflection on the constitution of the modern subject. Each essay explores one or more aspects of the formation of modern subjectivity through dramatic representation of the self and through critical enquiry into the modes of that representation. The first and the fourth sections discuss the complex interaction between the theoretical questions that animated the debate around the Romantic theatre and the multifarious and often unruly performance practices of the time. The other two sections deal with the many and diverse ways in which Romantic drama engaged with and incorporated other artistic genres such as painting, performing arts, music, and the novel.

Closet Stages

Closet Stages PDF Author: Catherine B. Burroughs
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512801011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
Closet Stages examines theater theory produced by middle- and upper-class British women-playwrights, actresses, and spectators-between 1790 and 1840. Shifting the focus away from the Romantic male writers to the journals, letters, and play prefaces in which women framed their relationship to the theater arts, Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage."

The Romantic Ideology

The Romantic Ideology PDF Author: Jerome J. McGann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226558509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Get Book Here

Book Description
Claiming that the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works have for too long been dominated by a Romantic ideology—by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism's own self-representations—Jerome J. McGann presents a new, critical view of the subject that calls for a radically revisionary reading of Romanticism. In the course of his study, McGann analyzes both the predominant theories of Romanticism (those deriving from Coleridge, Hegel, and Heine) and the products of its major English practitioners. Words worth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron are considered in greatest depth, but the entire movement is subjected to a searching critique. Arguing that poetry is produced and reproduced within concrete historical contexts and that criticism must take these contexts into account, McGann shows how the ideologies embodied in Romantic poetry and theory have shaped and distorted contemporary critical activities.

British Romantic Drama

British Romantic Drama PDF Author: Terence Allan Hoagwood
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838637432
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book Here

Book Description
The present volume attempts a systematic explanation of various dimensions of Romantic drama by foregrounding both the theoretical and practical questions bearing on Romantic drama in its historical situation. In this effort, the volume intentionally gravitates toward discussion of lesser-known works of the period, rather than such major dramas as Manfred or Prometheus Unbound. This is because the poetic dramas by Byron and Shelley have already been the subject of many useful historicist investigations, and also because lesser-known works - for instance, the dramas of Scott, Wordsworth's Borderers, and the many revolutionary and counter-revolutionary dramas of the period - provide avenues into historical and ideological issues that cannot be adequately addressed by exclusive attention to dramas long recognized as canonical.

The Gothic Novel and the Stage

The Gothic Novel and the Stage PDF Author: Francesca Saggini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317319516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this ground-breaking study Saggini explores the relationship between the late eighteenth-century novel and the theatre, arguing that the implicit theatricality of the Gothic novel made it an obvious source from which dramatists could take ideas. Similarly, elements of the theatre provided inspiration to novelists.

The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789-1805

The French Revolution and the London Stage, 1789-1805 PDF Author: George Taylor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521630525
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
This 2001 book looks at how British drama and popular entertainment were affected by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.

Joanna Baillie and the Art of Moral Influence

Joanna Baillie and the Art of Moral Influence PDF Author: Christine A. Colón
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433105364
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Get Book Here

Book Description
Joanna Baillie and the Art of Moral Influence explores the project of moral reform that Baillie sets out for herself in the Introductory Discourse to her first volume of Plays on the Passions (1798). It begins by revealing the foundation that Baillie creates for her project as she combines her own unique theology with eighteenth-century moral philosophy and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourses on the theatre's potential to reform audiences. This book argues that Baillie uses this eclectic mix to craft a potentially radical social critique in the midst of a seemingly conservative moral project. Using examples from fifteen of her plays as well as from her prefaces and her religious tract, the book traces Baillie's moral project from its direct representations in De Monfort and Henriquez through its dangerous complexities in plays such as Orra and The Trial to its conflict with domestic ideology as an alternative means of reform in plays such as The Dream, Ethwald, The Phantom, and Witchcraft. This analysis of Baillie's project reveals how she ultimately overcomes the difficulties inherent in her project by asking her audiences to take responsibility for their moral reform rather than relying upon the domestic woman to change society and by asking her audiences to ground their interpretations in the basic truths of Christianity. Understanding Baillie's moral project and the discourses that influenced it and then seeing how it is enacted throughout her plays will allow teachers and scholars to appreciate even more fully the complexities of this British Romantic playwright.