Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre PDF Author: Deborah Vlock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521640848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this 1998 study, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel-readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Dickens' time: voices of noted actors and actresses and of popular theatrical characters. She uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and reconstructs the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre PDF Author: Deborah Vlock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521640848
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dickens' novels, like those of his contemporaries, are more explicitly indebted to the theatre than scholars have supposed: his stories and characters were often already public property by the time they were published, circulating as part of a current theatrical repertoire well known to many Victorian readers. In this 1998 study, Deborah Vlock argues that novels - and novel-readers - were in effect created by the popular theatre in the nineteenth century, and that the possibility of reading and writing narrative was conditioned by the culture of the stage. Vlock resuscitates the long-dead voices of Dickens' theatrical sources, which now only tentatively inhabit reviews, scripts, fiction and non-fiction narratives, but which were everywhere in Dickens' time: voices of noted actors and actresses and of popular theatrical characters. She uncovers unexpected precursors for some popular Dickensian characters, and reconstructs the conditions in which Dickens' novels were initially received.

Dickens's Villains

Dickens's Villains PDF Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199261376
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study argues that Dickens' villains embody the crucial fusion between the deviant and theatrical aspects of his writing.

Dickens's Style

Dickens's Style PDF Author: Daniel Tyler
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by leading scholars, this collection of essays offers the first comprehensive and accessible book on Dickens's style.

Everyone’s Theater

Everyone’s Theater PDF Author: Michael Meeuwis
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131478
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

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.

Theater Figures

Theater Figures PDF Author: Emily Allen
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 9780814209318
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Why did nineteenth-century novels return, over again, to the scene of theater? Emily Allen argues that theater provided nineteenth-century novels, novelists, and critics with a generic figure that allowed them to position particular novels and novelistic genres within a complex literary field. Novel genres high and low, male and female, public and private, realistic and romantic, all came to identify themselves within a set of coordinates that included--if only for the purpose of exclusion--the spectacular figure of theater. This figure likewise provided a trope around and against which to construct images of readers and authors, images that most frequently worked to mediate between the supposedly private acts of reading and writing and the very public facts of the print market. In readings of novels by Burney, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Jewsbury, Flaubert, Braddon, and Moore, Allen shows how frequently theater appears as figure in novels of the nineteenth century, and how theater figures--actively and importantly--in what we have come to look back on as the history of the nineteenth-century novel. "Theater Figures thus offers a new model for thinking about how theater helped produce changes in the nineteenth-century literary market. While previous critics have considered theater as an enabling foil for the novel--either a constitutive opposite or constructive ally--Allen demonstrates how theater figures and tropes were used to negotiate competition among the novels and novelists eagerly seeking their share of the literary limelight.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830-1914

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1830-1914 PDF Author: Joanne Shattock
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521882885
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book Here

Book Description
A volume of essays on Victorian themes, genres and authors, aimed at students and lecturers.

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain PDF Author: Janis McLarren Caldwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
Although we have come to regard 'clinical' and 'romantic' as oppositional terms, romantic literature and clinical medicine were fed by the same cultural configurations. In the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, writers and doctors developed an interpretive method that negotiated between literary and scientific knowledge of the natural world. Literary writers produced potent myths that juxtaposed the natural and the supernatural, often disturbing the conventional dualist hierarchy of spirit over flesh. Clinicians developed the two-part history and physical examination, weighing the patient's narrative against the evidence of the body. Examining fiction by Mary Shelley, Carlyle, the Brontës and George Eliot, alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Janis McLarren Caldwell demonstrates the similar ways of reading employed by nineteenth-century doctors and imaginative writers and reveals the complexities and creative exchanges of the relationship between literature and medicine.

Blindness and Writing

Blindness and Writing PDF Author: Heather Tilley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108302807
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this innovative and important study, Heather Tilley examines the huge shifts that took place in the experience and conceptualisation of blindness during the nineteenth century, and demonstrates how new writing technologies for blind people had transformative effects on literary culture. Considering the ways in which visually-impaired people used textual means to shape their own identities, the book argues that blindness was also a significant trope through which writers reflected on the act of crafting literary form. Supported by an illuminating range of archival material (including unpublished letters from Wordsworth's circle, early ophthalmologic texts, embossed books, and autobiographies) this is a rich account of blind people's experience, and reveals the close, and often surprising personal engagement that canonical writers had with visual impairment. Drawing on the insights of disability studies and cultural phenomenology, Tilley highlights the importance of attending to embodied experience in the production and consumption of texts.

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel

Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel PDF Author: Aaron Rosenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009271806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology

Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology PDF Author: Linda M. Austin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110842855X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how the scientific question, 'Are we automata?', was addressed in late nineteenth-century literature and the arts.