This is the first book to explore the involvement of John Ruskin with the popular theatre of his time. Based on original archival research, this book offers a fresh look at the aesthetic and social theories of Ruskin and his direct and indirect influence on the commercial theatre of the late nineteenth century.
This collection of essays sets out to challenge the dominant narrative about Victorian theatre by placing the practices and products of the Victorian theatre in relation to Victorian visual culture, through the lens of the concept of 'Ruskinian theatre', an approach to theatre which values its educative purpose as well as its aesthetic expression.
During the reign of Queen Victoria, herself an ardent theatregoer as well as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a remarkable rapprochement was effected between the Church and the stage. This 1997 book explores the implications for the theatre of the great religious movements of the period: Tractarianism, Christian Socialism and Latitudinarianism. This central relationship is seen in the context of other important themes in Victorian cultural history such as censorship, urbanization, transport, leisure, self-improvement and women's emancipation. The volume contains portraits of significant churchmen, dramatists, actors and actresses, including Newman and Keble, Bulwer Lytton and Shaw, Irving, Fanny Kemble and Ellen Terry. They were amongst the influential figures who participated in the search for a common culture which preoccupied the nineteenth century. To the Victorians the Church and the theatre were important parts of everyday life; in this study the two institutions are explored in relation not only to each other but also to the social, economic and intellectual movements of the period.
This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin’s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
John Ruskin (1819–1900) was the most prominent art and architecture critic of his time. Yet his reputation has been overshadowed by his personal life, especially his failed marriage to Effie Gray, which has cast him in the history books as little more than a Victorian prude. In this book, Andrew Ballantyne rescues Ruskin from the dustbin of history’s trifles to reveal a deeply attuned thinker, one whose copious writings had tremendous influence on all classes of society, from roadmenders to royalty. Ballantyne examines a crucial aspect of Ruskin’s thinking: the notion that art and architecture have moral value. Telling the story of Ruskin’s childhood and enduring devotion to his parents—who fostered his career as a writer on art and architecture—he explores the circumstances that led to Ruskin’s greatest works, such as Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, and Unto This Last. He follows Ruskin through his altruistic ventures with the urban poor, to whom he taught drawing, motivated by a profound conviction that art held the key to living a worthwhile life. Ultimately, Ballantyne weaves Ruskin’s story into a larger one about Victorian society, a time when the first great industrial cities took shape and when art could finally reach beyond the wealthy elite and touch the lives of everyday people.
Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.
This trans-historical collection explores analogue performance technologies from Ancient Greece to pre-Second World War. From ancient mechanical elephants to early modern automata, Enlightenment electrical experiments to Victorian spectral illusions, this volume offers an original examination of the precursors of contemporary digital performance.
Examining the wide-ranging implications of Ruskin's engagement with his contemporaries and followers, this collection is organized around three related themes: Ruskin's intellectual legacy and the extent to which its address to working men and women and children was realised in practice; Ruskin's followers and their sites of influence, especially those related to the formation of collections, museums, archives and galleries representing values and ideas associated with Ruskin; and the extent to which Ruskin's work constructed a world-wide network of followers, movements and social gestures that acknowledge his authority and influence. As the introduction shows, Ruskin's continuing digital presence is striking and makes a case for Ruskin's persistent presence. The collection begins with essays on Ruskin's intellectual presence in nineteenth-century thought, with some emphasis on his interest in the education of women. This section is followed by one on Ruskin's followers from the mid-nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism that looks at a broad range of cultural activities that sought to further, repudiate, or exemplify Ruskin's work and teaching. Working-class education, the Ruskinian periodical, plays, and science fiction are all considered along with the Bloomsbury Group's engagement with Ruskin's thought and writing. Essays on Ruskin abroad-in America, Australia, and India round out the collection.
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.