Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637
Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.
Early Modern Theatricality
Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637
Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199641358
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 637
Book Description
Early Modern Theatricality brings together some of the most innovative critics in the field to examine the many conventions that characterized early modern theatricality. It generates fresh possibilities for criticism, combining historical, formal, and philosophical questions, in order to provoke our rediscovery of early modern drama.
The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China
Author: Ling Hon Lam
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479
Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479
Book Description
Emotion takes place. Rather than an interior state of mind in response to the outside world, emotion per se is spatial, at turns embedding us from without, transporting us somewhere else, or putting us ahead of ourselves. In this book, Ling Hon Lam gives a deeply original account of the history of emotions in Chinese literature and culture centered on the idea of emotion as space, which the Chinese call “emotion-realm” (qingjing). Lam traces how the emotion-realm underwent significant transformations from the dreamscape to theatricality in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China. Whereas medieval dreamscapes delivered the subject into one illusory mood after another, early modern theatricality turned the dreamer into a spectator who is no longer falling through endless oneiric layers but pausing in front of the dream. Through the lens of this genealogy of emotion-realms, Lam remaps the Chinese histories of morals, theater, and knowledge production, which converge at the emergence of sympathy, redefined as the dissonance among the dimensions of the emotion-realm pertaining to theatricality.The book challenges the conventional reading of Chinese literature as premised on interior subjectivity, examines historical changes in the spatial logic of performance through media and theater archaeologies, and ultimately uncovers the different trajectories that brought China and the West to the convergence point of theatricality marked by self-deception and mutual misreading. A major rethinking of key terms in Chinese culture from a comparative perspective, The Spatiality of Emotion in Early Modern China develops a new critical vocabulary to conceptualize history and existence.
Performance and Religion in Early Modern England
Author: Matthew J. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268104689
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 501
Book Description
In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268104689
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 501
Book Description
In Performance and Religion in Early Modern England, Matthew J. Smith seeks to expand our view of “the theatrical.” By revealing the creative and phenomenal ways that performances reshaped religious material in early modern England, he offers a more inclusive and integrative view of performance culture. Smith argues that early modern theatrical and religious practices are better understood through a comparative study of multiple performance types: not only commercial plays but also ballads, jigs, sermons, pageants, ceremonies, and festivals. Our definition of performance culture is augmented by the ways these events looked, sounded, felt, and even tasted to their audiences. This expanded view illustrates how the post-Reformation period utilized new capabilities brought about by religious change and continuity alike. Smith posits that theatrical practice at this time was acutely aware of its power not just to imitate but to work performatively, and to create spaces where audiences could both imaginatively comprehend and immediately enact their social, festive, ethical, and religious overtures. Each chapter in the book builds on the previous ones to form a cumulative overview of early modern performance culture. This book is unique in bringing this variety of performance types, their archives, venues, and audiences together at the crossroads of religion and theater in early modern England. Scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, and those generally interested in the Renaissance will enjoy this book.
Theatricality and Narrative in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland
Author: John J. McGavin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754607946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
John McGavin here analyses narrative accounts of public theatricality in late medieval and early modern Scottish culture (pre-1645). He shows that journals, memoirs and chronicles record events which were often ambiguous in genre, confrontational in action and aimed at both present and future 'spectators'. McGavin demonstrates that early Scottish culture is revealed as much in its processes of witnessing as in that which it claims to witness.
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754607946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
John McGavin here analyses narrative accounts of public theatricality in late medieval and early modern Scottish culture (pre-1645). He shows that journals, memoirs and chronicles record events which were often ambiguous in genre, confrontational in action and aimed at both present and future 'spectators'. McGavin demonstrates that early Scottish culture is revealed as much in its processes of witnessing as in that which it claims to witness.
How the World Became a Stage
Author: William Egginton
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487717
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791487717
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217
Book Description
What is special, distinct, modern about modernity? In How the World Became a Stage, William Egginton argues that the experience of modernity is fundamentally spatial rather than subjective and proposes replacing the vocabulary of subjectivity with the concepts of presence and theatricality. Following a Heideggerian injunctive to search for the roots of epochal change not in philosophies so much as in basic skills and practices, he describes the spatiality of modernity on the basis of a close historical analysis of the practices of spectacle from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, paying particular attention to stage practices in France and Spain. He recounts how the space in which the world is disclosed changed from the full, magically charged space of presence to the empty, fungible, and theatrical space of the stage.
Shakespeare's Double Helix
Author: Henry S. Turner
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
English literature.
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826491200
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 142
Book Description
English literature.
The Novel and Theatrical Imagination in Early Modern China
Author: Chun Mei
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004195939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of “the theatrical” to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel’s unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004195939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
The cultural fascination with and imagination of theater has long been overlooked as an important historical and literary context for reading Water Margin and Journey to the West. This study focuses on the concept of “the theatrical” to read those novels and their commentaries. Imbued with performances, playacting, spectacles, and spectatorship, the early modern theatrical novel borrowed heavily from theater to conflate the theatrical and the real, juggle theatrical roles, persons, and identities, and contest orthodoxies by challenging and appropriating sites of control and authority. This study showcases the theatrical novel’s unique position as a new form of literati self-representation in response to the destabilizing social and political forces of early modern China.
Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater
Author: Ronda Arab
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317690699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317690699
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284
Book Description
This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.
Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability
Author: Genevieve Love
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350017213
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350017213
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 215
Book Description
What work did physically disabled characters do for the early modern theatre? Through a consideration of a range of plays, including Doctor Faustus and Richard III, Genevieve Love argues that the figure of the physically disabled prosthetic body in early modern English theatre mediates a set of related 'likeness problems' that structure the theatrical, textual, and critical lives of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The figure of disability stands for the relationship between actor and character: prosthetic disabled characters with names such as Cripple and Stump capture the simultaneous presence of thefictional and the material, embodied world of the theatre. When the figure of the disabled body exits the stage, it also mediates a second problem of likeness, between plays in their performed and textual forms. While supposedly imperfect textual versions of plays have been characterized as 'lame', the dynamic movement of prosthetic disabled characters in the theatre expands the figural role which disability performs in the relationship between plays on the stage and on the page. Early Modern Theatre and the Figure of Disability reveals how attention to physical disability enriches our understanding of early modern ideas about how theatre works, while illuminating in turn how theatre offers a reframing of disability as metaphor.
Law as Performance
Author: Julie Stone Peters
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192653598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192653598
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, —as it still does today.