Theater Figures

Theater Figures

Author: Emily Allen

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780814209318

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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

Published: 2018-08-06

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1501729837

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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

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1351875868

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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

Published: 2011-11-24

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0199695040

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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.


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

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781625344731

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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.


Figures of Ill Repute

Figures of Ill Repute

Author: Charles Bernheimer

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780822319474

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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.


Historical Figures in Nineteenth Century Fiction

Historical Figures in Nineteenth Century Fiction

Author: Donald K. Hartman

Publisher: Epoch Books, Incorporated

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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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