Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107046300
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book establishes the significance of actresses, female playgoers and women critics in shaping Shakespeare's burgeoning reputation in the eighteenth century.

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107046300
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book establishes the significance of actresses, female playgoers and women critics in shaping Shakespeare's burgeoning reputation in the eighteenth century.

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century

Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139868012
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Fiona Ritchie analyses the significant role played by women in the construction of Shakespeare's reputation which took place in the eighteenth century. The period's perception of Shakespeare as unlearned allowed many women to identify with him and in doing so they seized an opportunity to enter public life by writing about and performing his works. Actresses (such as Hannah Pritchard, Kitty Clive, Susannah Cibber, Dorothy Jordan and Sarah Siddons), female playgoers (including the Shakespeare Ladies Club) and women critics (like Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith and Elizabeth Inchbald), had a profound effect on Shakespeare's reception. Interdisciplinary in approach and employing a broad range of sources, this book's analysis of criticism, performance and audience response shows that in constructing Shakespeare's significance for themselves and for society, women were instrumental in the establishment of Shakespeare at the forefront of English literature, theatre, culture and society in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Citoyennes

Citoyennes PDF Author: Annie K. Smart
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644531046
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women–the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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.

She Hath Been Reading

She Hath Been Reading PDF Author: Katherine West Scheil
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464692
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In the late nineteenth century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. In She Hath Been Reading, Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the twentieth century. Shakespeare clubs were crucial for women’s intellectual development because they provided a consistent intellectual stimulus (more so than was the case with most general women’s clubs) and because women discovered a world of possibilities, both public and private, inspired by their reading of Shakespeare. Indeed, gathering to read and discuss Shakespeare often led women to actively improve their lot in life and make their society a better place. Many clubs took action on larger social issues such as women’s suffrage, philanthropy, and civil rights. At the same time, these efforts served to embed Shakespeare into American culture as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations, varying in age, race, location, and social standing. Based on extensive research in the archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library and in dozens of local archives and private collections across America, She Hath Been Reading shows the important role that literature can play in the lives of ordinary people. As testament to this fact, the book includes an appendix listing more than five hundred Shakespeare clubs across America.

Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists

Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists PDF Author: Mary Pix
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199554811
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
"First published as an Oxford World's Classics paperback 2001"--T.p

Characteristics of Women

Characteristics of Women PDF Author: Mrs. Jameson (Anna)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Women in art
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description


Shakespeare and Women

Shakespeare and Women PDF Author: Phyllis Rackin
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198186940
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Shakespeare and Women situates Shakespeare's female characters in multiple historical contexts, ranging from the early modern England in which they originated to the contemporary Western world in which our own encounters with them are staged. In so doing, this book seeks to challenge currently prevalent views of Shakespeare's women-both the women he depicted in his plays and the women he encountered in the world he inhabited. Chapter 1, "A Usable History," analyses the implications and consequences of the emphasis on patriarchal power, male misogyny, and women's oppression that has dominated recent feminist Shakespeare scholarship, while subsequent chapters propose alternative models for feminist analysis. Chapter 2, "The Place(s) of Women in Shakespeare's World," emphasizes the frequently overlooked kinds of social, political, and economic agency exercised by the women Shakespeare would have known in both Stratford and London. Chapter 3, "Our Canon, Ourselves," addresses the implications of the modern popularity of plays such as The Taming of the Shrew which seem to endorse women's subjugation, arguing that the plays--and the aspects of those plays--that we have chosen to emphasize tell us more about our own assumptions than about the beliefs that informed the responses of Shakespeare's first audiences. Chapter 4, "Boys will be Girls," explores the consequences for women of the use of male actors to play women's roles. Chapter 5, "The Lady's Reeking Breath," turns to the sonnets, the texts that seem most resistant to feminist appropriation, to argue that Shakespeare's rewriting of the idealized Petrarchan lady anticipates modern feminist critiques of the essential misogyny of the Petrarchan tradition. The final chapter, "Shakespeare's Timeless Women," surveys the implication of Shakespeare's female characters in the process of historical change, as they have been repeatedly updated to conform to changing conceptions of women's nature and women's social roles, serving in ever-changing guises as models of an unchanging, universal female nature.

The Woman's Part

The Woman's Part PDF Author: Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252010163
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description


Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Tanya M. Caldwell
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1551119161
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.