Author: Brenda Assael
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Get Book Here
Book Description
This conflict informs us not only of the complicated role that the circus played in Victorian society but provides a unique view into a collective psyche fraught by contradiction and anxiety.
Author: Janet M. Davis
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807861499
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Get Book Here
Book Description
A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that everyone could go to the show. In this entertaining and provocative book, Janet Davis links the flowering of the early-twentieth-century American railroad circus to such broader historical developments as the rise of big business, the breakdown of separate spheres for men and women, and the genesis of the United States' overseas empire. In the process, she casts the circus as a powerful force in consolidating the nation's identity as a modern industrial society and world power. Davis explores the multiple "shows" that took place under the big top, from scripted performances to exhibitions of laborers assembling and tearing down tents to impromptu spectacles of audiences brawling, acrobats falling, and animals rampaging. Turning Victorian notions of gender, race, and nationhood topsy-turvy, the circus brought its vision of a rapidly changing world to spectators--rural as well as urban--across the nation. Even today, Davis contends, the influence of the circus continues to resonate in popular representations of gender, race, and the wider world.
Author: Elizabeth Macneal
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982106816
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
From the #1 internationally bestselling author of the “lush, evocative Gothic” (The New York Times Book Review) The Doll Factory comes an atmospheric and spectacular novel about a woman transformed by the arrival of a Victorian circus of wonders—“as moving as it is deeply entertaining” (Daniel Mason, New York Times bestselling author). Step up, step up! In 1860s England, circus mania is sweeping the nation. Crowds jostle for a glimpse of the lion-tamers, the dazzling trapeze artists and, most thrilling of all, the so-called “human wonders.” When Jasper Jupiter’s Circus of Wonders pitches its tent in a poor coastal town, the life of one young girl changes forever. Sold to the ringmaster as a “leopard girl” because of the birthmarks that cover her body, Nell is utterly devastated. But as she grows close to the other performers, she finds herself enchanted by the glittering freedom of the circus, and by her own role as the Queen of the Moon and Stars. Before long, Nell’s fame spreads across the world—and with it, a chance for Jasper Jupiter to grow his own name and fortune. But what happens when her fame begins to eclipse his own, when even Jasper’s loyal brother Toby becomes captivated by Nell? No longer the quiet flower-picker, Nell knows her own place in the world, and she will fight for it. Circus of Wonders is a beautiful story about the “complex dance between exploitation and empowerment, and the question of what it really means to have control over your own life” (Naomi Ishiguro, author of Escape Routes).
Author: John Woolf
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
ISBN: 1789290368
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Get Book Here
Book Description
The untold story of the Victorian freak show and circus, and the remarkable cast of characters who performed in them.
Author: Gareth H. H. Davies
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781909796324
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130
Get Book Here
Book Description
The life story of Pablo Fanque, or William Darby, the first black circus proprietor. His most recent fame is through the words of the Beatles song 'Being for the Benefit of Mr KIte'. Bornn in Norwich in 1810, he went on to become a nationally famous equestrian perfomer and circus owner.
Author: Steve Ward
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781733971270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Get Book Here
Book Description
We live in a society that places an increasing value in ethnic diversity and cultural identity. However, the contribution that performers from a variety of ethnic backgrounds made to the development of the circus in the nineteenth century is very often overlooked and largely forgotten. Pablo Fanque and Miss La La may be notable names of the period but there were many others besides. Using contemporary records and images, this book explores the wealth and depth of talented black and other ethnic performers, and the contribution they made to the success of the nineteenth century circus. These are iconic figures who should be drawn in from the margins of history and given the recognition they deserve.
Author: Gillian Arrighi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108485162
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Get Book Here
Book Description
An authoritative introduction to the specialised histories of the modern circus, its unique aesthetics, and its contemporary manifestations and scholarship, from its origins in commercial equestrian performance, to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.
Author: Gillian Beer
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780415026079
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
In this elegantly written collection Gillian Beer considers the difficulty of reading the past in essays on Thomas Carlyle, Philip Sidney, Samuel Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
Author: Adelene Buckland
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022667682X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.
Author: Matthew Sweet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466872713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
