The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre PDF Author: Kerry Powell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795364
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre PDF Author: Kerry Powell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521795364
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
This Companion is designed for readers interested in the creation, production and interpretation of Victorian and Edwardian theatre in its own time and on the contemporary stage. The volume opens with an introduction surveying the theatre of the time, followed by an essay contextualizing the theatre within the culture as a whole. Succeeding chapters examine performance, production, and theatre, including the music, the actors, stagecraft and the audience; plays and playwriting and issues of class and gender. Chapters also deal with comedy, farce, melodrama, and the economics of the theatre.

The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin

The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin PDF Author: Andrew Kahn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827413
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Book Description
Alexander Pushkin stands in a unique position as the founding father of Russian literature. In this Companion, leading scholars discuss Pushkin's work in its political, literary, social and intellectual contexts. In the first part of the book individual chapters analyse his poetry, his theatrical works, his narrative poetry and historical writings. The second section explains and samples Pushkin's impact on broader Russian culture by looking at his enduring legacy in music and film from his own day to the present. Special attention is given to the reinvention of Pushkin as a cultural icon during the Soviet period. No other volume available brings together such a range of material and such comprehensive coverage of all Pushkin's major and minor writings. The contributions represent state-of-the-art scholarship that is innovative and accessible, and are complemented by a chronology and a guide to further reading.

The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee

The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee PDF Author: Stephen Bottoms
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521834551
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Edward Albee, perhaps best known for his acclaimed and infamous 1960s drama Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is one of America's greatest living playwrights. Now in his seventies, he is still writing challenging, award-winning dramas. This collection of essays on Albee, which includes contributions from the leading commentators on Albee's work, brings fresh critical insights to bear by exploring the full scope of the playwright's career, from his 1959 breakthrough with The Zoo Story to his recent Broadway success, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002). The contributors include scholars of both theatre and English literature, and the essays thus consider the plays both as literary texts and as performed drama. The collection considers a number of Albee's lesser-known and neglected works, provides a comprehensive introduction and overview, and includes an exclusive, original interview with Mr Albee, on topics spanning his whole career.

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction PDF Author: Edward James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521016575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Table of contents

The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden

The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden PDF Author: Stan Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139827138
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This volume brings together specially commissioned essays by some of the world's leading experts on the life and work of W. H. Auden, one of the major English-speaking poets of the twentieth century. The volume's contributors include a prize-winning poet, Auden's literary executor and editor, and his most recent, widely acclaimed biographer. It offers fresh perspectives on his work from Auden critics, alongside specialists from such diverse fields as drama, ecological and travel studies. It provides scholars, students and general readers with a comprehensive and authoritative account of Auden's life and works in clear and accessible English. Besides providing authoritative accounts of the key moments and dominant themes of his poetic development, the Companion examines his language, style and formal innovation, his prose and critical writing and his ideas about sexuality, religion, psychoanalysis, politics, landscape, ecology, and globalisation. It also contains a comprehensive bibliography of writings about Auden.

Re-Imagining DEFA

Re-Imagining DEFA PDF Author: Séan Allan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533106X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”

British Nautical Melodramas, 1820–1850

British Nautical Melodramas, 1820–1850 PDF Author: Arnold Schmidt
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315530120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1224

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Book Description
During the 1820s and 30s nautical melodramas "reigned supreme" on London stages, entertaining the mariners and maritime workers who comprised a large part of the audience for small theatres. These plays mixed sentimental moments and comic interludes of domestic melodrama with patriotic images that communicated and reinforced imperial themes. However, generally the study of British theatre history moves from medieval and renaissance plays directly to the realism and naturalism of late Victorian and modern drama. Readers typically encounter a gap between Restoration and eighteenth-century plays like those of Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and late-nineteenth plays by Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. Nineteenth-century drama, with the possible exception of plays by Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth, remains all but invisible. Until recently, melodramatic plays written and performed during this "gap" received little scholarly attention, but their value as reflections of Britain’s promulgation of imperial ideology — and its role in constructing and maintaining class, gender, and racial identities — have given discussions of melodrama force and momentum. The plays included in these three volumes have never appeared in a critical anthology and most have not been republished since their original nineteenth-century editions. Each play is transcribed from original documents and includes an author biography, a headnote about the play itself, full annotations with brief definitions of unfamiliar vocabulary, and explanatory notes. Comprehensive editorial apparatus details the nineteenth-century imperial, naval, political, and social history relevant to the plays’ nautical themes, as well as discussing nineteenth-century theatre history, melodrama generally, and the nautical melodrama in particular. Contemporary theatre practices — acting, audiences, staging, lighting, special effects — are also examined. An extensive bibliography of primary and secondary texts; a complete index; and contemporary images of the actors, theatres, stage sets, playbills, costumes, and locales have been compiled to aid study further.

Subscription Theater

Subscription Theater PDF Author: Matthew Franks
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297415
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Subscription Theater asks why turn-of-the-century British and Irish citizens spent so much time, money, and effort adding their names to subscription lists. Shining a spotlight on private play-producing clubs, public repertory theaters, amateur drama groups, and theatrical magazines, Matthew Franks locates subscription theaters in a vast constellation of civic subscription initiatives, ranging from voluntary schools and workers' hospitals to soldiers' memorials and Diamond Jubilee funds. Across these enterprises, Franks argues, subscribers created their own spaces for performing social roles from which they had long been excluded. Whether by undermining the authority of the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays and London's commercial theater producers, or by extending rights to disenfranchised women and property-less men, a diverse cast of subscribers including typists, plumbers, and maids acted as political representatives for their fellow citizens, both inside the theater and far beyond it. Citizens prized a "democratic" or "representative" subscription list as an end in itself, and such lists set the stage for the eventual public subsidy of subscription endeavors. Subscription Theater points to the importance of printed ephemera such as programs, tickets, and prospectuses in questioning any assumption that theatrical collectivity is confined to the live performance event. Drawing on new media as well as old, Franks uses a database of over 23,000 stage productions to reveal that subscribers introduced nearly a third of the plays that were most frequently revived between 1890 and the mid-twentieth century, as well as nearly half of all new translations, and they were instrumental in staging the work of such writers as Shaw and Ibsen, whose plays featured subscription lists as a plot point or prop. Although subscribers often are blamed for being a conservative force in theater, Franks demonstrates that they have been responsible for how we value audience and repertoire today, and their history offers a new account of the relationship between ephemera, drama, and democracy.

The History of British Women's Writing, 1830-1880

The History of British Women's Writing, 1830-1880 PDF Author: Lucy Hartley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137584653
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

Everyone’s Theater

Everyone’s Theater PDF Author: Michael Meeuwis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472125796
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.