Tragic Muse

Tragic Muse PDF Author: Rachel Brownstein
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307831825
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Rachel Felix (1821-58), the homely daughter of poor Jewish peddlers, was the first stage actress to achieve international stardom - and the last person one would have expected to resurrect the cultural patrimony of France. Yet her passionate, startling performances of the works of Racine and Corneille saved them from almost certain obsolescence after the fall of Napoleon (who had relished classical French tragedy) and the emergence of Romanticism. Audiences in Paris, London, Boston, and Moscow thrilled to her voice, and devoured the rumors of her offstage promiscuity and extravagance. Her fame - equal parts popularity and notoriety - was so great that she could nonchalantly dispose of her last name. La grande Rachel virtually invented the role of the superstar, while remaining a symbol of the highest art and most serious cultural pursuits. Indeed, her identity was fraught with such contradictions - which intrigued the public all the more. From the moment she was discovered playing the guitar on the streets of Lyons, to her debut on the Parisian stage at the age of fifteen, to her critical and commercial triumphs as Camille, Phedre, and other tormented women, Rachel's career was exhaustively "managed." A series of theater gurus, influential reviewers, and impresarios - including her brash and opportunistic father - claimed the credit for her astonishing success. What this abundance of male managers has always obscured is Rachel's own decisiveness and control over her time and money - not only did she play her various champions (and high-profile lovers) against one another, she openly defied them. Some called her stubborn, even perverse; in these pages, we come to recognize her as a woman ahead of her time, a charismatic individual very much in charge of her own destiny. As her fascination with all things Napoleonic suggests, Rachel liked power - both personal and professional - and had the talent to command it.

Tragic Muse

Tragic Muse PDF Author: Rachel Brownstein
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307831825
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
Rachel Felix (1821-58), the homely daughter of poor Jewish peddlers, was the first stage actress to achieve international stardom - and the last person one would have expected to resurrect the cultural patrimony of France. Yet her passionate, startling performances of the works of Racine and Corneille saved them from almost certain obsolescence after the fall of Napoleon (who had relished classical French tragedy) and the emergence of Romanticism. Audiences in Paris, London, Boston, and Moscow thrilled to her voice, and devoured the rumors of her offstage promiscuity and extravagance. Her fame - equal parts popularity and notoriety - was so great that she could nonchalantly dispose of her last name. La grande Rachel virtually invented the role of the superstar, while remaining a symbol of the highest art and most serious cultural pursuits. Indeed, her identity was fraught with such contradictions - which intrigued the public all the more. From the moment she was discovered playing the guitar on the streets of Lyons, to her debut on the Parisian stage at the age of fifteen, to her critical and commercial triumphs as Camille, Phedre, and other tormented women, Rachel's career was exhaustively "managed." A series of theater gurus, influential reviewers, and impresarios - including her brash and opportunistic father - claimed the credit for her astonishing success. What this abundance of male managers has always obscured is Rachel's own decisiveness and control over her time and money - not only did she play her various champions (and high-profile lovers) against one another, she openly defied them. Some called her stubborn, even perverse; in these pages, we come to recognize her as a woman ahead of her time, a charismatic individual very much in charge of her own destiny. As her fascination with all things Napoleonic suggests, Rachel liked power - both personal and professional - and had the talent to command it.

The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse PDF Author: Anne Rachel Leonard
Publisher: Smart Museum of Art, the University of C
ISBN: 9780935573497
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Feb. 10-June 5, 2011.

The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141922125
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
'You must paint her just like that ... as the Tragic Muse' Suggests one of James's characters to Nick Dormer, the young Englishman who, during the course of the novel, will courageously resist the glittering Parliamentary career desired for him by his family, in order to paint. His progress is counterpointed by the 'Tragic Muse' of the title, Miriam Rooth, one of James's most fierily beautiful creations, a great actress indifferent to social reputation, and triumphantly dedicated to her art. In portraying the conflict between art and 'the world' which is his novel's central idea, James engaged obliquely with current debates on the new aestheticism of Pater and Wilde and on the nature of the actor's performance. Through the living complexity of his protagonists he reveals how much, as Philip Horne puts it, 'to take art seriously as an end in itself ... is still a provocative course'.

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse

Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse PDF Author: Stephanie Nelson
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004310916
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
Despite the many studies of Greek comedy and tragedy separately, scholarship has generally neglected the relation of the two. And yet the genres developed together, were performed together, and influenced each other to the extent of becoming polar opposites. In Aristophanes and His Tragic Muse, Stephanie Nelson considers this opposition through an analysis of how the genres developed, by looking at the tragic and comic elements in satyr drama, and by contrasting specific Aristophanes plays with tragedies on similar themes, such as the individual, the polis, and the gods. The study reveals that tragedy’s focus on necessity and a quest for meaning complements a neglected but critical element in Athenian comedy: its interest in freedom, and the ambivalence of its incompatible visions of reality.

Tragic Muse

Tragic Muse PDF Author: Rachel M. Brownstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822315711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The great nineteenth-century tragedienne known simply as Rachel was the first dramatic actress to achieve international fame. Composing her own persona with the same brilliance and passion she demonstrated on stage, she virtually invented the role of "star." Rumors of her extravagant life offstage delighted the audiences who flocked to theaters in Boston and Paris, London and Moscow, to see her perform in the tragedies of Racine and Corneille. In Tragic Muse, Rachel M. Brownstein reveals the life of la grande Rachel and explores--at the boundary of biography, fiction, and cultural history--the connections between this self-dramatizing woman and her image. Born to itinerant Jewish peddlers in 1821, Rachel arrived on the Paris stage at the age of fifteen. She became both a symbol of her culture's highest art and a clue to its values and obsessions. Fascinated with all things Napoleonic, she was the mother of Napoleon's grandson and the lover of many men connected to the emperor. Her story--the rise from humble beginnings to queen of the French state theater--echoes and parodies Napoleon's own. She decisively controlled her career, her time, and finances despite the actions and claims of managers, suitors, and lovers. A woman of exceptional charisma, Rachel embodied contradiction and paradox. She captured the attention of her time and was memorialized in the works of Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James. Richly illustrated with portraits, photographs, and caricatures, Tragic Muse combines brilliant literary analysis and exceptional historical research. With great skill and acuity, Rachel M. Brownstein presents Rachel--her brief intense life and the image that was both self-fashioned and, outliving her, fashioned by others. First published by Knopf (1993), this book will attract a broad audience interested in matters as wide ranging as the construction of character, the cult of celebrity, women's lives, and Jewish history. It will also be of enduring interest to readers concerned with nineteenth-century French culture, history, literature, theater, and Romanticism. Tragic Muse won the 1993 George Freedley Award presented by the Theater Library Association.

The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse

The Tragic Life Story of Medea as Mother, Monster, and Muse PDF Author: Jana Rivers Norton
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527543404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This volume offers a critical yet empathic exploration of the ancient myth of Medea as immortalized by early Greek and Roman dramatists to showcase the tragic forces afoot when relational suffering remains unresolved in the lives of individuals, families and communities. Medea as a tragic figure, whose sense of isolation and betrayal interferes with her ability to form healthy attachments, reveals the human propensity for violence when the agony of unresolved grief turns to vengeance against those we hold most dear. However, metaphorically, her life story as an emblem for existential crisis serves as a psychological touchstone in the lives of early twentieth-century female authors, who struggled to find their rightful place in the world, to resolve the sorrow of unrequited love and devotion, and to reconcile experiences of societal abandonment and neglect as self-discovery.

The Tragic Muse

The Tragic Muse PDF Author: Henry James
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description


Transatlantic Spectacles of Race

Transatlantic Spectacles of Race PDF Author: Kimberly Snyder Manganelli
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813549914
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The tragic mulatta was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American literature, an attractive mixed-race woman who became a casualty of the color line. The tragic muse was an equally familiar figure in Victorian British culture, an exotic and alluring Jewish actress whose profession placed her alongside the “fallen woman.” In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. In both cases, the eroticized and racialized female body is put on public display, as a highly enticing commodity in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Tracing these figures through American, British, and French literature and culture, Manganelli constructs a host of surprising literary genealogies, from Zelica to Daniel Deronda, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Lady Audley’s Secret. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

A lecture on the tragic Muse of Greece

A lecture on the tragic Muse of Greece PDF Author: William WORSELDINE
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Muses (Greek deities)
Languages : en
Pages : 14

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Book Description


Euripides and the Tragic Tradition

Euripides and the Tragic Tradition PDF Author: Anne Norris Michelini
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299107642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
Euripides and the Tragic Tradition asks all the right questions. It forces us to confront the many contradictions in Euripides' work, demonstrates the differences between the literary assumptions of Sophocles and Euripides, and challenges us to respond to Euripidean drama with sophistication and sensitivity. --Francis M. Dunn, Scholia.