Sophie Duncan illuminates iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and careers of the actresses who played them. Duncan draws on a wealth of archival material to explore the vital ways in which fin-de-siecle Shakespeare and Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other.
Shakespeare's Women and the Fin de Siècle illuminates the most iconoclastic performances of Shakespeare's heroines in late Victorian theatre, through the celebrity, commentary, and wider careers of the actresses who played them. By bringing together fin-de-siècle performances of Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian drama for the first time, this book illuminates the vital ways in which fin-de-siècle Shakespeare and contemporary Victorian theatre culture conditioned each other. Actresses' movements between Shakespeare and fin-de-siècle roles reveal the collisions and unexpected consonances between apparently independent areas of the fin-de-siècle repertory. Performances including Ellen Terry's Lady Macbeth, Madge Kendal's Rosalind, and Lillie Langtry's Cleopatra illuminate fin-de-siècle Shakespeare's lively intersections with cultural phenomena including the 'Jack the Ripper' killings, Aestheticism, the suicide craze, and the rise of metropolitan department stores. If, as previous studies have shown, Shakespeare was everywhere in Victorian culture, Sophie Duncan explores the surprising ways in which late-Victorian culture, from Dracula to pornography, and from Ruskin to the suffragettes, inflected Shakespeare. Via a wealth of unpublished archival material, Duncan reveals women's creative networks at the fin de siècle, and how Shakespearean performance traditions moved between actresses via little-studied performance genealogies. At the same time, controversial new stage business made fin-de-siècle Shakespeare as much a crucible for debates over gender roles and sexuality as plays by Ibsen and Shaw. Increasingly, actresses' creative networks encompassed suffragist activists, who took personal inspiration from star Shakespearean actresses. From a Salome-esque Juliet to a feminist Paulina, fin-de-siècle actresses created cultural legacies which Shakespeare-in-performance still negotiates today.
Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'
“Film has kept turning to most of Shakespeare's work throughout the entire history of the medium. With a renewed boom of Shakespeare on screen in the 1990s, academic awareness of, and interest in this phenomenon has increased drastically and now faces an enormous range of different filmic references to Shakespeare and his work, all classified as 'Skakespearean film'. This book concentrates on one play, Richard III, and explores the possible variants and different types of Skakespearean film by surveying in what different ways and formats Richard III has appeared on screen. While the play has always enjoyed great popularity in performance, especially for its leading part, it is also very complex and has been considered difficult for its references to history, its political entanglements and its strong suggestions of a prevailing moral order of divine retribution. It is the objective of this study to find out how cinema and television as media designed for mass appeal deal with this play.“ -- author.
Ziegler, Dolan, and Roberts' "attention is directed specifically to the representations of Shakespeare's women in the Victorian era, rather than on the Elizabethan stage ... [They have] culled from the [Folger] Library's vast holdings a remarkably varied and illuminating array of books, manuscripts, and illustrations which provide a new understanding of how Shakespeare's heroines came to embody, reflect, and refract the values and assumptions of nineteenth-century English society."--Foreword, p.7.
The Myth and Madness of Ophelia explores the visual representation of one of Shakespeare's most intriguing and popular heroines, from her earliest appearance in 18th-century illustrated editions of Hamlet to the present. Artists represented here include Benjamin West, Eughne Delacroix, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Steichen, Gwen John, Alfred Hitchcock, and Louise Bourgeois
Love for Sale is the first study to examine the ubiquity of commercial sex in Russian literary and artistic production from the nineteenth century through the fin de siècle. Colleen Lucey offers a compelling account of how the figure of the sex worker captivated the public's imagination through depictions in fiction and fine art, bringing to light how imperial Russians grappled with the issue of sexual commerce. Studying a wide range of media—from little-known engravings that circulated in newspapers to works of canonical fiction—Lucey shows how writers and artists used the topic of prostitution both to comment on women's shifting social roles at the end of tsarist rule and to express anxieties about the incursion of capitalist transactions in relations of the heart. Each of the book's chapters focus on a type of commercial sex, looking at how the street walker, brothel worker, demimondaine, kept woman, impoverished bride, and madam traded in sex as a means to acquire capital. Lucey argues that prostitution became a focal point for imperial Russians because it signaled both the promises of modernity and the anxieties associated with Westernization. Love for Sale integrates historical analysis, literary criticism, and feminist theory and conveys how nineteenth-century beliefs about the "fallen woman" drew from medical, judicial, and religious discourse on female sexuality. Lucey invites readers to draw a connection between rhetoric of the nineteenth century and today's debate on sex workers' rights, highlighting recent controversies concerning Russian sex workers to show how imperial discourse is recycled in the twenty-first century.
