Victorian Writers and the Stage

Victorian Writers and the Stage
Author: R. Pearson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2015-06-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1137504684

This book examines the dramatic work of Dickens, Browning, Collins, and Tennyson, their interaction with the theatrical world, and their attempts to develop their reputations as playwrights. These major Victorian writers each authored several professional plays, but why has their achievement been overlooked?

Acting Naturally

Acting Naturally
Author: Lynn M. Voskuil
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813922690

Voskuil argues that Victorian Britons saw themselves as "authentically performative," a paradoxical belief that focused their sense of vocation as individuals, as a public, and as a nation.

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage
Author: C. Wynne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137298995

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage re-appraises Stoker's key fictions in relation to his working life. It takes Stoker's work from the margins to centre stage, exploring how Victorian theatre's melodramatic and Gothic productions influenced his writing and thinking.

Victorians on Broadway

Victorians on Broadway
Author: Sharon Aronofsky Weltman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2020-06-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9780813944319

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2013-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691159548

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Actresses on the Victorian Stage

Actresses on the Victorian Stage
Author: Gail Marshall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1998-05-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521620161

Gail Marshall argues that the professional and personal history of the Victorian actress was largely defined by her negotiation with the sculptural metaphor, and that this was authorized and determined by the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. Drawing on evidence of theatrical fictions, visual representations and popular culture's assimilation of the sculptural image, as well as theatrical productions, she examines some of the manifestations of the sculptural metaphor on the legitimate English stage, and its implications for the actress in the later nineteenth century. Within the legitimate theatre, the 'Galatea-aesthetic' positioned actresses as predominantly visual and sexual commodities whose opportunities for interpretative engagement with their plays were minimal. This dominant aesthetic was effectively challenged only at the end of the century, with the advent of the 'New' drama, and the emergence of a body of autobiographical writings by actresses.

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain
Author: K. Newey
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2005-11-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0230554903

Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians.

The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage

The Victorian Actress in the Novel and on the Stage
Author: Renata Kobetts Miller
Publisher: EUP
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Actresses in literature
ISBN: 9781474439503

This book analyses how Victorian novels and plays used the actress, a significant figure for the relationship between women and the public sphere, to define their own place within and among genres and in relation to audiences.

Reading Victorian Literature

Reading Victorian Literature
Author: Wolfreys Julian Wolfreys
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 619
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 1474448003

A Festschrift honouring J. Hillis Miller and his contribution to Victorian Studies and nineteenth-century criticismProvides stheoretically informed critical essays on nineteenth-century and Victorian literature, by major internationally recognized scholarsChapters provide detailed close readings of the work of J Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, William Michael Rossetti, George Gissing, Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Joseph ConradShowcases a major new essay by J Hillis Miller, as well as a previously unpublished interview with MillerReading Victorian Literature provides a critical commentary on major authors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Dickens to Conrad. At the same time, the assembled group of internationally recognised scholars engages with Miller's work, influence and significance in the study of that era. The volume includes original work by Miller and interviews with him.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination
Author: Allen MacDuffie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2014-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139993291

Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.