Fictions of Presence

Fictions of Presence PDF Author: Rosalind Ballaster
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783275588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.

Fictions of Presence

Fictions of Presence PDF Author: Rosalind Ballaster
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783275588
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
An absorbing study of the contested embodiment of the idea of presence in the plays and novels of the eighteenth century.

Character's Theater

Character's Theater PDF Author: Lisa A. Freeman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201949
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
If the whole world acted the player, how did the player act the world? In Character's Theater, Lisa A. Freeman uses this question to test recent critical discussion of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Much current work, she observes, focuses on the concept of theatricality as both the governing metaphor of social life and a primary filter of psychic perception. Hume's "theater of the mind," Adam Smith's "impartial spectator," and Diderot's "tableaux" are all invoked by theorists to describe a process whereby the private individual comes to internalize theatrical logic and apprehend the self as other. To them theatricality is a critical mechanism of modern subjectivity but one that needs to be concealed if the subject's stability is to be maintained. Finding that much of this discussion about the "Age of the Spectator" has been conducted without reference to the play texts or actual theatrical practice, Freeman turns to drama and discovers a dynamic model of identity based on eighteenth-century conceptualizations of character. In contrast to the novel, which cultivated psychological tensions between private interiority and public show, dramatic characters in the eighteenth century experienced no private thoughts. The theater of the eighteenth century was not a theater of absorption but rather a theater of interaction, where what was monitored was not the depth of character, as in the novel, but the arc of a genre over the course of a series of discontinuous acts. In a genre-by-genre analysis of plays about plays, tragedy, comedies of manners, humours, and intrigue, and sentimental comedy, Freeman offers an interpretive account of eighteenth-century drama and its cultural work and demonstrates that by deploying an alternative model of identity, theater marked a site of resistance to the rise of the subject and to the ideological conformity enforced through that identity formation.

Essays on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage

Essays on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage PDF Author: Kenneth R. Richards
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000030865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The eighteenth century produced more inventive actors than fine dramatists, and it displayed its actors to increasing advantage as theatre management became more expert, and stage design more ambitious. First published in 1972, the eleven papers collected in The Eighteenth-Century English Stage, originally read at a Manchester University Symposium in July 1971, follow this historical emphasis. Two papers are centred on dramatists, four on actors, three on managers, and two on designers. Malcolm Kelsall analyses Steele’s debt to Terence, using his classical scholarship as illuminatingly as Edgar Roberts uses his musical scholarship in writing about the songs in Fielding’s plays. George Taylor compares and evaluates a number of theories of acting, and speculates on the likely relevance of the best-known books on rhetoric, whilst Kathleen Barker, Arnold Hare, and David Rostron consider the work of individual actors – Powell, Cooke, and John Kemble. Theatre managers are represented by John Rich in Paul Sawyer’s sympathetic account, Thomas Harris, who is given new life in the recent researches of Cecil Price, and Stephen Kemble, fixed by Kenneth Robinson in canny control of the Newcastle theatre circuit. Finally, Graham Barlow reaches some controversial conclusions about the dimensions of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, by subjecting Thornhill’s sketches to a practising designer’s statistical examination, and Sybil Rosenfeld carries a stage further her pioneering work on eighteenth-century scene-painting and design. The two last are attractively illustrated by 8 pages of plates. This book’s particular value lies in its bringing together several simply presented but deeply informed explorations of often neglected aspects of the eighteenth-century theatre. The papers, with their general sense of enthusiasm and concern for their subject, will interest all students of the eighteenth century, and theatre enthusiasts in particular.

Criticism, Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century

Criticism, Performance and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: James Harriman-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110883549X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Recovers eighteenth-century appreciation of transition as a critical tool for analysing the expression and reception of emotion in theatre.

The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama

The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama PDF Author: Kristina Straub
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317426525
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1547

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Book Description
The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama brings together the work of key playwrights from 1660 to 1800, divided into three main sections: Restoring the Theatre: 1660–1700 Managing Entertainment: 1700–1760 Entertainment in an Age of Revolutions: 1760–1800 Each of the 20 plays featured is accompanied by an extraordinary wealth of print and online supplementary materials, including primary critical sources, commentaries, illustrations, and reviews of productions. Taking in the spectrum of this period’s dramatic landscape—from Restoration tragedy and comedies of manners to ballad opera and gothic spectacle—The Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama is an essential resource for students and teachers alike.

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521898609
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830

The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730-1830 PDF Author: Daniel O'Quinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521617772
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This Companion offers a wide-ranging and innovative guide to one of the most exciting and important periods in British theatrical history. The scope of the volume extends from the age of Garrick to the Romantic transformation of acting inaugurated by Edmund Kean. It brings together cutting-edge scholarship from leading international scholars in the long eighteenth century, offering lively and original insights into the world of the stage, its most influential playwrights and the professional lives of celebrated performers such as James Quin, George Anne Bellamy, John Philip Kemble, Dora Jordan, Fanny Abington and Sarah Siddons. The volume includes essential chapters about eighteenth-century acting, production and audiences, important surveys of key theatrical forms such as tragedy, comedy, melodrama and pantomime as well as a range of exciting thematic essays on subjects such as private theatricals, 'black' theatre and the representation of empire.

The Pleasures of the Imagination

The Pleasures of the Imagination PDF Author: John Brewer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113591236X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820

Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820 PDF Author: David O'Shaughnessy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108498140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Reveals the contribution of Irish writers to the Georgian English stage; argues that theatre is an important strand of the Irish Enlightenment.

British Enlightenment Theatre

British Enlightenment Theatre PDF Author: Bridget Orr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108499716
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Reveals how England's eighteenth-century theatre dramatized anti-imperial protest, and gave voice to oppressed groups.