Closet Stages examines theater theory produced by middle- and upper-class British women-playwrights, actresses, and spectators-between 1790 and 1840. Shifting the focus away from the Romantic male writers to the journals, letters, and play prefaces in which women framed their relationship to the theater arts, Catherine Burroughs reveals how a concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between "closet" and "stage."
Examines theory produced by women playwrights, actresses, and spectators of the middle and upper classes, as expressed in journals, letters, and play prefaces. Shows how their concern with the performative aspects of daily life and the movement between public and private spheres produced a notion of the theater that complicates the Romantic opposition between closet and stage. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The 12 Stages of Healing is an extraordinary new approach to healing the mind and body. Dr. Epstein, founder and creator of Network Spinal, offers fascinating insights into the complex relationship between mind, emotions, and body, and shows us how to promote greater health in our bodies and harmony in our relationships. Have you, or someone you love, experienced . . . · A recurring sickness, healing crisis, or life-threatening illness? · A feeling of emptiness and longing for no apparent reason? · A major trauma, emotional hardship, or life-changing event? · A feeling of being stuck in a pattern of self-destructive behavior? After observing thousands of people in both private practice and public seminars, Dr. Epstein discovered 12 basic rhythms, or stages of consciousness, shared by all humanity. Each stage of healing has a distinct “rite of passage” that helps us to reunite with aspects of ourselves that are traumatized, alienated, forgotten, abused, shamed, or unforgiven. Each stage also has a characteristic pattern of breath, movement, and touch that can help us to reconnect with the natural, internal rhythms of our body, and experience a greater sense of joy and well-being. “Donald Epstein is an extraordinary healer. In my 25 years of traveling the globe, I’ve never seen anyone who is able to produce the impact he does in such a short period of time. He opens our hearts to new possibilities for individuals and humanity.” — Tony Robbins, Peak Performance Coach and best-selling author of Unlimited Power
Closet Drama: History, Theory, Form introduces the emerging field of Closet Drama Studies by featuring twelve original essays from distinguished scholars who offer fresh and illuminating perspectives on closet drama as a genre. Examining an unusual mix of historical narratives, performances, and texts from the Renaissance to the present, this collection unleashes a provocative array of theoretical concerns about the phenomenon of the closet play—a dramatic text written for reading rather than acting.
The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides a comprehensive guide to theatre of the Georgian era across the range of dramatic forms.
Grounded equally in discussions of theater history, literary genre, and theory, Martin Puchner's Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama explores the conflict between avant-garde theater and modernism. While the avant-garde celebrated all things theatrical, a dominant strain of modernism tended to define itself against the theater, valuing lyric poetry and the novel instead. Defenders of the theater dismiss modernism's aversion to the stage and its mimicking actors as one more form of the old "anti-theatrical" prejudice. But Puchner shows that modernism's ambivalence about the theater was shared even by playwrights and directors and thus was a productive force responsible for some of the greatest achievements in dramatic literature and theater. A reaction to the aggressive theatricality of Wagner and his followers, the modernist backlash against the theater led to the peculiar genre of the closet drama—a theatrical piece intended to be read rather than staged—whose long-overlooked significance Puchner traces from the theatrical texts of Mallarmé and Stein to the dramatic "Circe" chapter of Joyce's Ulysses. At times, then, the anti-theatrical impulse leads to a withdrawal from the theater. At other times, however, it returns to the stage, when Yeats blends lyric poetry with Japanese Nôh dancers, when Brecht controls the stage with novelistic techniques, and when Beckett buries his actors in barrels and behind obsessive stage directions. The modernist theater thus owes much to the closet drama whose literary strategies it blends with a new mise en scène. While offering an alternative history of modernist theater and literature, Puchner also provides a new account of the contradictory forces within modernism.
Bringing together eminent scholars and emerging critics, this collection sets a new standard in Beddoes criticism. The contributors assess Beddoes's German context, read his plays in light of recent work on theatre history and gender, and revisit key areas in Beddoes's scholarship such as nineteenth-century medical theories, psychoanalytic myth, and Romantic ventriloquism. The volume makes the case for Beddoes's centrality to debates about nineteenth-century literary culture and its contexts.
Women Making Shakespeare presents a series of 20-25 short essays that draw on a variety of resources, including interviews with directors, actors, and other performance practitioners, to explore the place (or constitutive absence) of women in the Shakespearean text and in the history of Shakespearean reception - the many ways women, working individually or in communities, have shaped and transformed the reception, performance, and teaching of Shakespeare from the 17th century to the present. The book highlights the essential role Shakespeare's texts have played in the historical development of feminism. Rather than a traditional collection of essays, Women Making Shakespeare brings together materials from diverse resources and uses diverse research methods to create something new and transformative. Among the many women's interactions with Shakespeare to be considered are acting (whether on the professional stage, in film, on lecture tours, or in staged readings), editing, teaching, academic writing, and recycling through adaptations and appropriations (film, novels, poems, plays, visual arts).
This study focuses on the six writing men who have been throughout decades regarded as the alpha and omega of British Romanticism: Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth. It sees these men as a representative cohort of their time and examines their letters as results of a reading process. Although letters are usually seen as additional sources of reference in literary studies, in this book they are treated as the dominant information material: correspondence enables to reconsider British Romanticism on the basis of the epistolary communication of the first half of the nineteenth century. The target information from the letters are references to women writers and to their writings. A detailed analysis of the correspondence manages to answer the question whether male Romantics regarded writing women as “provoking” from time to time, as Duncan Wu assumes, and whether the gender identity of the woman author influenced the way male readers read her literary works. The examination of the correspondence thus takes a gendered perspective on British Romanticism. This approach to the target research data discloses a long list of almost 120 names of women writers from different periods and of different literary genres. Whereas the male readers in question have acquired a well-established, stable long-term position within literary history, the women were often marginalized, even forgotten. The study presents plentiful examples proving the discrepancies between what the twenty-first-century reader regards as the core of women’s Romantic literary tradition, and what the Romantic reader did. The following women writers are discussed in the study in detail: Susannah Centlivre, Anne Finch (Lady Winchelsea), Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Mary Shelley, Joanna Baillie, Maria Edgeworth, Maria Jane Jewsbury, Catherine Grace Godwin, and Emmeline Fisher.
