Theater Figures

Theater Figures
Author: Emily Allen
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2003
Genre: Actors in literature
ISBN: 9780814209318

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 Spectacular Past

The Spectacular Past
Author: Maurice Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501729837

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

Victorian Publishing

Victorian Publishing
Author: Alexis Weedon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2017-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351875868

Drawing on research into the book-production records of twelve publishers-including George Bell & Son, Richard Bentley, William Blackwood, Chatto & Windus, Oliver & Boyd, Macmillan, and the book printers William Clowes and T&A Constable - taken at ten-year intervals from 1836 to 1916, this book interprets broad trends in the growth and diversity of book publishing in Victorian Britain. Chapters explore the significance of the export trade to the colonies and the rising importance of towns outside London as centres of publishing; the influence of technological change in increasing the variety and quantity of books; and how the business practice of literary publishing developed to expand the market for British and American authors. The book takes examples from the purchase and sale of popular fiction by Ouida, Mrs. Wood, Mrs. Ewing, and canonical authors such as George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Mark Twain. Consideration of the unique demands of the educational market complements the focus on fiction, as readers, arithmetic books, music, geography, science textbooks, and Greek and Latin classics became a staple for an increasing number of publishing houses wishing to spread the risk of novel publication.

The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe

The Historical Novel in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Author: Brian Hamnett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2011-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199695040

Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

Characters in 20th-century Literature

Characters in 20th-century Literature
Author: Kelly King Howes
Publisher: Detroit, MI : Gale Research
Total Pages: 530
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Provides essays on the most representative and most studied literary characters from international contemporary writers.

Historical Figures in Nineteenth Century Fiction

Historical Figures in Nineteenth Century Fiction
Author: Donald K. Hartman
Publisher: Epoch Books, Incorporated
Total Pages: 216
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

A complement to Historical Figures in Fiction, which covers novels published after 1940; plans are afoot to fill the inside straight with a third volume. To help readers, librarians, teachers, and literary researchers identify and use biographical fiction, Hartman lists nearly 1,000 historical figures that appear in over 1,800 novels. In the main list by historical figure, the entries include vital dates and a brief occupation or character description before citing fully each novel. The reading level of the novels is also indicated. The indexes are by author, occupation, and title. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Figures of Ill Repute

Figures of Ill Repute
Author: Charles Bernheimer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1997
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780822319474

Ubiquitous in the streets and brothels of nineteenth-century Paris, the prostitute was even more so in the novels and paintings of the time. Charles Bernheimer discusses how these representations of the sexually available woman express male ambivalence about desire, money, class, and the body. Interweaving close textual analysis with historical anecdote and theoretical speculation, Bernheimer demonstrates how the formal properties of art can serve strategically to control anxious fantasies about female sexual power. Drawing on methods derived from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, social history, feminist theory, and narrative analysis, this interdisciplinary classic (available now for the first time in paperback) was awarded Honorable Mention in 1990 for the James Russell Lowell prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for the best book of criticism.

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures
Author: Bessie Head
Publisher: Heinemann
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1992
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780435909819

Botswana village tales about subjects such as the breakdown of family life and the position of women in this society.

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature

The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-century American Literature
Author: Jonathan Senchyne
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781625344731

The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.