Harlequin Britain

Harlequin Britain PDF Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801879104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In the fall of 1723, two London theaters staged, almost simultaneously, pantomime performances of the Faust story. Unlike traditional five-act plays, pantomime—a bawdy hybrid of dance, music, spectacle, and commedia dell'arte featuring the familiar figure of the harlequin at its center—was a theatrical experience of unprecedented accessibility. The immediate popularity of this new genre drew theater apprentices to the cities to learn the new style, and pantomime became the subject of lively debate within British society. Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding bitterly opposed the intrusion into legitimate literary culture of what they regarded as fairground amusements that appealed to sensation and passion over reason and judgment. In Harlequin Britain, literary scholar John O'Brien examines this new form of entertainment and the effect it had on British culture. Why did pantomime become so popular so quickly? Why was it perceived as culturally threatening and socially destabilizing? O’Brien finds that pantomime’s socially subversive commentary cut through the dampened spirit of debate created by Robert Walpole's one-party rule. At the same time, pantomime appealed to the abstracted taste of the mass audience. Its extraordinary popularity underscores the continuing centrality of live performance in a culture that is most typically seen as having shifted its attention to the written text—in particular, to the novel. Written in a lively style rich with anecdotes, Harlequin Britain establishes the emergence of eighteenth-century English pantomime, with its promiscuous blending of genres and subjects, as a key moment in the development of modern entertainment culture.

Harlequin Britain

Harlequin Britain PDF Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801879104
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
In the fall of 1723, two London theaters staged, almost simultaneously, pantomime performances of the Faust story. Unlike traditional five-act plays, pantomime—a bawdy hybrid of dance, music, spectacle, and commedia dell'arte featuring the familiar figure of the harlequin at its center—was a theatrical experience of unprecedented accessibility. The immediate popularity of this new genre drew theater apprentices to the cities to learn the new style, and pantomime became the subject of lively debate within British society. Alexander Pope and Henry Fielding bitterly opposed the intrusion into legitimate literary culture of what they regarded as fairground amusements that appealed to sensation and passion over reason and judgment. In Harlequin Britain, literary scholar John O'Brien examines this new form of entertainment and the effect it had on British culture. Why did pantomime become so popular so quickly? Why was it perceived as culturally threatening and socially destabilizing? O’Brien finds that pantomime’s socially subversive commentary cut through the dampened spirit of debate created by Robert Walpole's one-party rule. At the same time, pantomime appealed to the abstracted taste of the mass audience. Its extraordinary popularity underscores the continuing centrality of live performance in a culture that is most typically seen as having shifted its attention to the written text—in particular, to the novel. Written in a lively style rich with anecdotes, Harlequin Britain establishes the emergence of eighteenth-century English pantomime, with its promiscuous blending of genres and subjects, as a key moment in the development of modern entertainment culture.

A Field Guide to Harlequins and Other Common Ladybirds of Britain and Ireland

A Field Guide to Harlequins and Other Common Ladybirds of Britain and Ireland PDF Author: Helen B. C. Boyce
Publisher: Pelagic Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784272450
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
The invasive Harlequin ladybird is an eye-catching and beautiful species, but it can be very difficult to identify, with huge variation in colouration and pattern. This comprehensive photographic field guide is the first complete guide to identifying Harlequin ladybirds found in Britain and Ireland. It also covers all the other 25 conspicuous ladybird species that occur. Detailed, informative and beautifully illustrated with more than 350 remarkable colour photographs including ladybird developmental time sequences and numerous images of each ladybird species Ground-breaking quick key for Harlequin identification Includes a photographic guide to the larvae of all 26 species – the first of its kind Easy to follow comprehensive descriptions and explanations of ladybird lifecycles and habits This clear, user-friendly field guide is ideal for anyone interested in learning how to identify a Harlequin ladybird, from beginners to more experienced entomologists, students and professionals. This book is ideal for learning to recognise and understand this charismatic and significant beetle.

Harlequin Empire

Harlequin Empire PDF Author: David Worrall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Under the 1737 Licensing Act, Covent Garden, Dury Lane and regional Theatres Royal held a monopoly on the dramatic canon. This work explores the presentation of foreign cultures and ethnicities on the popular British stage from 1750 to 1840. It argues that this illegitimate stage was the site for a plebeian Enlightenment.

Harlequin (The Grail Quest, Book 1)

Harlequin (The Grail Quest, Book 1) PDF Author: Bernard Cornwell
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007338783
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 54

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Book Description
It was the time when the English came across the Channel to take the battle to the French.

Harlequin Empire

Harlequin Empire PDF Author: David Worrall
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317315480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Under the 1737 Licensing Act, Covent Garden, Dury Lane and regional Theatres Royal held a monopoly on the dramatic canon. This work explores the presentation of foreign cultures and ethnicities on the popular British stage from 1750 to 1840. It argues that this illegitimate stage was the site for a plebeian Enlightenment.

Popular Children’s Literature in Britain

Popular Children’s Literature in Britain PDF Author: Julia Briggs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351910035
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 541

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Book Description
The astonishing success of J.K. Rowling and other contemporary children's authors has demonstrated how passionately children can commit to the books they love. But this kind of devotion is not new. This timely volume takes up the challenge of assessing the complex interplay of forces that have created the popularity of children's books both today and in the past. The essays collected here ask about the meanings and values that have been ascribed to the term 'popular'. They consider whether popularity can be imposed, or if it must always emerge from children's preferences. And they investigate how the Harry Potter phenomenon fits into a repeated cycle of success and decline within the publishing industry. Whether examining eighteenth-century chapbooks, fairy tales, science schoolbooks, Victorian adventures, waif novels or school stories, these essays show how historical and publishing contexts are vital in determining which books will succeed and which will fail, which bestsellers will endure and which will fade quickly into obscurity. As they considering the fiction of Angela Brazil, Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling, the contributors carefully analyse how authorial talent and cultural contexts combine, in often unpredictable ways, to generate - and sometimes even sustain - literary success.

Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-raisers, and Afterpieces

Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-raisers, and Afterpieces PDF Author: Daniel James Ennis
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874139679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers, and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage presents a fresh analysis of the complete theater evening that was available to playhouse audiences from the Restoration to the early nineteenth century. The contributing scholars focus not on the mainpiece, the advertised play itself, but on what surrounded the mainpiece for the total theater experience of the day. Various critical essays address artistic disciplines such as dance and theatrical portraits, while others concentrate on peripheral performance texts, including prologues, epilogues, pantomimes, and afterpieces, that merged to define the overall theatrical event.

The Politics of Parody

The Politics of Parody PDF Author: David Francis Taylor
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300223757
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
An original take on literary history that uses visual satire to explore literature's importance to eighteenth-century political culture

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context

The Arabian Nights in Historical Context PDF Author: Saree Makdisi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191564966
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Alf layla wa layla (known in English as A Thousand and One Nights or The Arabian Nights) changed the world on a scale unrivalled by any other literary text. Inspired by a fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript, the appearance of Antoine Galland's twelve-volume Mille et Une Nuits in English translation (1704-1717), closely followed by the Grub Street English edition, drew the text into European circulation. Over the following three hundred years, a widely heterogeneous series of editions, compilations, translations, and variations circled the globe to reveal the absorption of The Arabian Nights into English, Continental, and global literatures, and its transformative return to modern Arabic literature, where it now enjoys a degree of prominence that it had never attained during the classical period. Beginning with a thorough introduction situating The Arabian Nights in its historical and cultural contexts-and offering a fresh examination of the text's multiple locations in the long history of modern Orientalism—this collection of essays by noted scholars from 'East', 'West', and in-between reassesses the influence of the Nights in Enlightenment and Romantic literature, as well as the text's vigorous after-life in the contemporary Arabic novel.

Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century

Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Pamela J. Albert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135907986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century revisits eighteenth-century cultural artifacts through the lens of creative works produced by contemporary writers Beryl Gilroy (Guyana), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and David Dabydeen (Guyana). While early studies of post-colonization literature focused on how revisions of historical works "write back" to the British empire, this study argues that trans-historical, cross-cultural dialogues also reveal the global complexity of eighteenth-century cultural forms (i.e. the periodical essay, travel narrative, pantomime, satirical engraving, and slave narrative). By transforming the generic form of their eighteenth-century sources, the African and Caribbean writers in this study strategically call attention to the modes of storytelling utilized by eighteenth-century writers Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, William Hogarth, Isaac Bickerstaff, and Ignatius Sancho, and subsequently expose how the encounters, exchanges, and acts of resistance taking place around the world influenced aesthetic experimentation in England. Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century is thus a reconsideration of eighteenth-century literature, art, and drama. However, because these engagements with British literature, art, and drama concurrently reflect twentieth-century encounters with neocolonial oppression, political violence, and racism, this study also proposes that engagements with the British eighteenth century double as inquiries into whether the modern world has progressed since the eighteenth century.