Victorian Epic Burlesques
Victorian Epic Burlesques

Author: Rachel Bryant Davies

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1350027197

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This anthology presents annotated scripts of four major burlesques by key playwrights: Melodrama Mad! or, the Siege of Troy by Thomas John Dibdin (1819); Telemachus; or, the Island of Calypso by J.R. Planché (1834); The Iliad; or, the Siege of Troy by Robert Brough (1858) and Ulysses; or the Ironclad Warriors and the Little Tug of War by F.C. Burnand (1865). Beloved legend, archaeological riddle and educational staple: Homer's epic tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath were vividly reimagined in nineteenth-century Britain. Classical burlesques-exceptionally successful theatrical entertainments-continually mined the Iliad and Odyssey to lucrative comic effect. Burlesques combined song, dance and slapstick comedy with an eclectic kaleidoscope of topical allusions. From namedropping boxing legends to recasting Shakespearean combats, epic adaptations overflow with satirical commentary on politics, cultural highlights and everyday current affairs. In uncovering Homer's irreverently playful afterlife, this selection showcases burlesque's development and wide appeal. The critical introduction analyses how these plays contested the accessibility of classical antiquity and dramatic performance. Textual and literary annotations, with contemporary illustrations, illuminate the juxtaposed sources to establish these repackaged epics as indispensable tools for unlocking nineteenth-century social, cultural and political history. Resources for further study are available online.

Liberal Epic
Liberal Epic

Author: Edward Adams

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2011-08-30

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0813931509

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In Liberal Epic, Edward Adams examines the liberal imagination’s centuries-long dependence on contradictory, and mutually constitutive, attitudes toward violent domination. Adams centers his ambitious analysis on a series of major epic poems, histories, and historical novels, including Dryden’s Aeneid, Pope’s Iliad, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Byron’s Don Juan, Scott’s Life of Napoleon, Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula, Macaulay’s History of England, Hardy’s Dynasts, and Churchill’s military histories—works that rank among the most important publishing events of the past three centuries yet that have seldom received critical attention relative to their importance. In recovering these neglected works and gathering them together as part of a self-conscious literary tradition here defined as liberal epic, Adams provides an archaeology that sheds light on contemporary issues such as the relation of liberalism to war, the tactics for sanitizing heroism, and the appeal of violence to supposedly humane readers. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics
Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics

Author: Clinton Machann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-06

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1317099796

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Offering provocative readings of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Clough's Amours de Voyage, and Browning's The Ring and the Book, Clinton Machann brings to bear the ideas and methods of literary Darwinism to shed light on the central issue of masculinity in the Victorian epic. This critical approach enables Machann to take advantage of important research in evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, among other scientific fields, and to bring the concept of human nature into his discussions of the poems. The importance of the Victorian long poem as a literary genre is reviewed in the introduction, followed by transformative close readings of the poems that engage with questions of gender, particularly representations of masculinity and the prevalence of male violence. Machann contextualizes his reading within the poets' views on social, philosophical, and religious issues, arguing that the impulses, drives, and tendencies of human nature, as well as the historical and cultural context, influenced the writing and thus must inform the interpretation of the Victorian epic.

Epic
Epic

Author: Herbert F. Tucker

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-11-29

Total Pages: 748

ISBN-13: 0199232997

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Literary history has conventionally viewed Milton as the last real practitioner of the epic in English verse. Herbert Tucker's spirited book shows that the British tradition of epic poetry was unbroken from the French Revolution to World War I.

A Visual Dictionary of Victorian Life
A Visual Dictionary of Victorian Life

Author: Bobbie Kalman

Publisher: Crabtree Visual Dictionaries

Published: 2010-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780778735076

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Learn all about Victorian times in this illustrated dictonary from Crabtree Publishing.

The Victorian World
The Victorian World

Author: Anne DeLong

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-12-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13:

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An indispensable resource for readers investigating Victorian literature and culture, this book offers a comprehensive summary of the historical, social, political, and cultural contexts of Victorian England. The Victorian era was a time of great social, scientific, and cultural change. The literary works of that period reflect that change and help us to better understand the Victorian world. This book examines the historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of several important Victorian literary works: Jane Eyre,, by Charlotte Brontë; Wuthering Heights,, by Emily Brontë; A Tale of Two Cities,, by Charles Dickens; and several poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, including "The Cry of the Children," "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point," "A Curse for a Nation," and Aurora Leigh.. The volume provides historical explanations, literary analyses, and cultural context for each literary work, including primary documents from the nineteenth century. Topics investigated include women's rights, workers' rights, education reforms, marriage laws, race relations, inheritance and heredity, and other issues concerning gender, race, and class in the nineteenth century. Readers will gain a greater understanding of these major literary works as well as their historical context.

The Victorian Verse-novel
The Victorian Verse-novel

Author: Stefanie Markovits

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0198718861

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The Victorian Verse-Novel: Aspiring to Life considers the rise of a hybrid generic form, the verse-novel, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such poems combined epic length with novelistic plots in the attempt to capture not a heroic past but the quotidian present. Victorian verse-novels also tended to be rough-mixed, their narrative sections interspersed with shorter, lyrical verses in varied measures. In flouting the rules of contemporary genre theory, which saw poetry as the purview of the eternal and ideal and relegated the everyday to the domain of novelistic prose, verse-novels proved well suited to upsetting other hierarchies, as well, including those of gender and class. The genre's radical energies often emerge from the competition between lyric and narrative drives, between the desire for transcendence and the quest to find meaning in what happens next; the unusual marriage plots that structure such poems prove crucibles of these rival forces. Generic tensions also yield complex attitudes towards time and space: the book's first half considers the temporality of love, while its second looks at generic geography through the engagement of novels in verse with Europe and the form's transatlantic travels. Both well-known verse-novels (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage, Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House) and lesser-known examples are read closely alongside a few nearly related works (Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book). An Afterword traces the verse-novel's substantial influence on the modernist novel.

Victorian Women Writers and the Classics
Victorian Women Writers and the Classics

Author: Isobel Hurst

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-09-14

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0199283516

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"In this study, Isobel Hurst brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the Romantic and Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.