Author : Stephen Watt
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 15,96 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0190227958
This book traces the often uncanny relationships between Irish- and Jewish-America, arguing for the centrality of these two diasporic groups to the development of American popular music, fiction, and especially drama.
Author : Jerry Lutz
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 31,12 MB
Release : 1974
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780838712474
Author : Mary Christian
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 45,18 MB
Release : 2020-04-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 3030406393
This book examines plays produced in England in the 1890s and early 1900s and the ways in which these plays responded to changing perceptions of marriage. Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and other late-Victorian dramatists challenged romanticized ideals of love and domesticity, and, in the process, these authors appropriated and rewrote the genre conventions that had dominated English drama for much of the nineteenth century. In their plays, theater became a forum for debating the problems of traditional marriage and envisioning alternative forms of partnership. This book is written for scholars specializing in the areas of Victorian studies, dramatic literature, theater history, performance studies, and gender studies.
Author : J. Richards
Publisher : Springer
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 16,45 MB
Release : 2009-10-09
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0230250890
The first study of the depictions of the Ancient World on the Victorian and Edwardian stage, this book analyzes plays set in and dramatising the histories of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Babylon and the Holy Land. In doing so, it seeks to locate theatre within the wider culture, tracing its links and interaction with other cultural forms.
Author : Nathan Waddell
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 39,96 MB
Release : 2019-06-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192548654
How and why did the life and music of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) matter to experimental writers in the early twentieth century? Previous answers to this question have tended to focus on structural analogies between musical works and literary texts, charting the many different ways in which poetry and prose resemble Beethoven's compositions. This book takes a different approach. It focuses on how early twentieth-century writers--chief among them E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, and Virginia Woolf--profited from the representational conventions associated in the nineteenth century and beyond with Beethovenian culture. The emphasis of Moonlighting falls for the most part on how modernist writers made use of Beethovenian legend. It is concerned neither with formal similarities between Beethoven's music and modernist writing nor with the music of Beethoven per se, but with certain ways of understanding Beethoven's music which had long before 1900 taken shape as habit, myth, cliché, and fantasy, and with the influence they had on experimental writing up to 1930. Moonlighting suggests that the modernists drew knowingly and creatively on the conventional. It proposes that many of the most experimental works of modernist literature were shaped by a knowing reliance on Beethovenian consensus; in short, that the literary modernists knew Beethovenian legend when they saw it, and that they were eager to use it.
Author : Nicholas Dromgoole
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 459 pages
File Size : 35,34 MB
Release : 2016-03-02
Category : Art
ISBN : 1783192305
Until the beginning of the 20th Century, when naturalism began to assert its powerful influence on western theatre, acting was a very different business indeed. Rather than attempting to reproduce realistic behaviour, actors conveyed their characters' feelings and intentions by using a vocabulary of minutely prescribed and highly stylised movements and gestures, each with it's own meaning and significance. In this wide-ranging, illustrated survey, Nicholas Dromgoole traces the origins and evolution of this lost 'language of gesture' from ancient Greece to the contemporary stage, and asks what it would actually have been like to watch the great plays - and the great actors - of western theatre in their own day.
Author : Michael Baker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 42,31 MB
Release : 2015-07-24
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1317399099
Originally published in 1978. Between 1830 and 1890 the English theatre became recognisably modern. Standards of acting and presentation improved immeasurably, new playwrights emerged, theatres became more comfortable and more intimate and playgoing became a national pastime with all classes. The actor’s status rose accordingly. In 1830 he had been little better than a social outcast; by 1880 he had become a member of a skilled, relatively well-paid and respected profession which was attracting new recruits in unprecedented numbers. This is a social history of Victorian actors which seeks to show how wider social attitudes and developments affected the changing status of acting as a profession. Thus the stage’s relationship with the professional world and the other arts is dealt with and is followed by an assessment of the moral and religious background which played so decisive a part in contemporary attitudes to actors. The position of actresses in particular is given special consideration. Many non-theatrical sources are used here and there is a survey of salaries and working conditions in the theatre to show how the rising social status of the actor was matched by changes in his theatrical standing. A novel area of study is covered in tracing the changing social composition of the acting profession over the period and in exploring the case-histories of three generations of performers.
Author : L. Woods
Publisher : Springer
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 45,48 MB
Release : 2016-09-23
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1137097396
This book shows eminent actors performing under stringent conditions in vaudeville. It was a strange notion in 1900 that leading lights of the legitimate stage would ever join a bill of 'turns', with everything from song-and-dance to criminals regaling crowds with their exploits. It chronicles renowned actors showing rough fare in rough times.
Author : Rohan McWilliam
Publisher :
Page : 400 pages
File Size : 42,27 MB
Release : 2020
Category : History
ISBN : 019882341X
The first history of the West End of London, showing how the nineteenth-century growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry shaped modern culture and consumer society, and made London a world centre of entertainment and glamour.
Author : David J. Skal
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 38,61 MB
Release : 2008-11-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0813172187
Late in Claude Rains's distinguished career, a reverent film journalist wrote that Rains "was as much a cinematic institution as the medium itself." Given his childhood speech impediments and his origins in a destitute London neighborhood, the ascent of Claude Rains (1889–1967) to the stage and screen is remarkable. Rains's difficulties in his formative years provided reserves of gravitas and sensitivity, from which he drew inspiration for acclaimed performances in The Invisible Man (1933), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Casablanca (1942), Notorious (1946), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and other classic films. In Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice, noted Hollywood historian David J. Skal draws on more than thirty hours of newly released Rains interviews to create the first full-length biography of the actor who was nominated multiple times for an Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor. Skal's portrait of the gifted actor also benefits from the insights of Jessica Rains, who provides firsthand accounts of the enigmatic man behind her father's refined screen presence and genteel public persona. As Skal shows, numerous contradictions informed the life and career of Claude Rains. He possessed an air of nobility and became an emblem of sophistication, but he never shed the insecurities that traced back to his upbringing in an abusive and poverty-stricken family. Though deeply self-conscious about his short stature, Rains drew notorious ardor from female fans and was married six times. His public displays of dry wit and good humor masked inner demons that drove Rains to alcoholism and its devastating consequences. Skal's layered depiction of Claude Rains reveals a complex, almost inscrutable man whose nuanced characterizations were, in no small way, based on the more shadowy parts of his psyche. With unprecedented access to episodes from Rains's private life, Skal tells the full story of the consummate character actor of his generation. Claude Rains: An Actor's Voice, gives voice to the struggles and innermost concerns that influenced Rains's performances and helped him become a universally respected Hollywood legend.
