Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Diane Piccitto is Associate Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University.
Terry F. Robinson is Associate Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto.
Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830
<p>“Reading this collection was a rare pleasure. Each of these wonderful essays models, often self-consciously, the challenges and rewards that engagement with this archive brings. Rather than rehearse ‘the same anecdote of irretrievable loss’, to borrow Joseph Roach’s characterization of much theater history, the contributors to this collection find thrilling epistemological potential in thinking anew about various theatrical media (newspapers, watercolors, playtexts, engravings, diaries, caricatures, playbills, set designs, toy theaters) less as records of performance than as themselves a still-live repertoire.”</p>
David Francis Taylor, Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford
<p>“The volume’s thesis, that a substantive investigation of spectacle and the visual elements of Romantic theatre force us to reconsider the primarily textual theses that govern the idea of Romanticism, is both timely and needed. Its transdisciplinary approach, rooted jointly in performance studies and theatre history, promises to reassess the oft-denigrated 6th category of Aristotelian dramatic analysis and unpack spectacle’s aesthetic, political, and cultural significance, both on and off the stage. These are <i>the </i>most important voices in later-eighteenth-century and Romantic theatre studies, and to have them assembled promises readers that this will not just be a collection but a field-defining conversation.”</p>
Misty G. Anderson, James R. Cox Professor of English, University of Tennessee
<p>“A field-shaping collection of essays that unveil the lost delights of Romantic-era theatre culture: playbill typography, costume trimming, souvenir fans, toy theatres, stage makeup, mimodrama, and scene maquettes. Through their wide-ranging analyses, the contributors reanimate the stage productions that thrilled Romantic theatre-goers.”</p>
Judith Pascoe, George Mills Harper Professor of English, Florida State University
<p>"...Piccitto and Robinson's editorship of <i>The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830</i> is high-tier and a principal reason for the collection's readability and persuasiveness. Given the quality of writing and research one finds here, <i>The Visual Life</i> will generatively influence our understanding of Romantic theatre for years to come." </p>
- The Byron Journal,
<p>"The volume is a <i>tour de force</i>, bringing together a range of scholars who complement and challenge each other to open up the field of Romanticism to new forms of inquiry."</p>
Yasser Shams Khan, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
<p>"The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780–1830 is a robust collection of essays. With dozens of illustrations, its thirteen chapters offer a feast for the eyes and the mind. The book’s methodology is interdisciplinary with emphases on performance, transmedia, and cultural studies. Were <i>The Visual Life</i> an evening at the theater, it would include tragedy, comedy, melodrama, pantomime, and opera, star legitimate and illegitimate, male and female, and White and Black actors, and feature mise-en-scène prisons, moving statues, alluring costumes, enchanting music, nuanced lighting, ghostly presences, and background mirrors."</p>
Brian Bates, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
<p>“Taking its cue from scholars such as William Galperin, Sophie Thomas, Gillen D'Arcy Wood and others, who have expounded the importance of the visual for Romantic thinkers—not simply as a foil to the imagination, but as it relates to the bodily experience of seeing—this collection interrogates the complex visuality of the theater in this period, from stage spectacles and visual effects to elements of theatrical spectatorship employed in the work of William Blake.”</p>
Katie Noble, Studies in Romanticism
<p>“The volume brings an unprecedented critical attention to the visual elements of Romanic culture, to the history of scholarship on the visual in Romanticism, and to the existing range of archival material still available to scholars and awaiting further examination and analysis.”</p>
Thomas C. Crochunis, European Romantic Review
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship by re-envisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social creation in the period. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extratheatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
Provides fresh perspectives on the Romantic era through a focus on the visual nature and impact of the stage
Introduction
Romanticism, Visuality, and the Theater | Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson
I. Imagined Scenes
1. The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship | Terry F. Robinson
2. “Mind-Forg’d Manacles”: The Scenography of the Romantic Prison | Joseph Roach
3. Some Versions of Spectacle: Worldmaking and the Regency Toy Theater | Daniel O’Quinn
4. Conjuring the Space and the Right to Appear in Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) | Dana Van Kooy
II. Spectacular Bodies
5. “I Saw Othello’s Visage in His Mind”: Visualizing Othello in Nineteenth-Century British Theater | Atesede Makonnen
6. Playing “Alive”: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage | Sophie Thomas
7. “Dresses in Hand”: Mary Rein’s Costume Workshop and the Spectacle of Romantic Theater | Susan E. Brown
8. The Singing Cat: British Audiences, Angelica Catalani, and the Threat of Opera | Uri Erman
III. Performances in Print
9. The Stage in a Page: A Visual Life of Romantic Playbills | Michael Gamer
10. Between Media: Harlequinade’s and Melodrama’s Visuality in Print | Deven M. Parker
11. Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, Londina Illustrata, and the Visual Life of Regency Theater | Gillian Russell
12. Staging Satire: Gillray and “Caricatura-Sublime” | Heather McPherson
13. Theatrical Spectatorship in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel: From Oblivion to Redemption | Diane Piccitto
Afterword
Romanticism Is Seeing Ghosts | Jonathan Mulrooney
<p>“Reading this collection was a rare pleasure. Each of these wonderful essays models, often self-consciously, the challenges and rewards that engagement with this archive brings. Rather than rehearse ‘the same anecdote of irretrievable loss’, to borrow Joseph Roach’s characterization of much theater history, the contributors to this collection find thrilling epistemological potential in thinking anew about various theatrical media (newspapers, watercolors, playtexts, engravings, diaries, caricatures, playbills, set designs, toy theaters) less as records of performance than as themselves a still-live repertoire.”</p>
David Francis Taylor, Associate Professor of English, University of Oxford
<p>“The volume’s thesis, that a substantive investigation of spectacle and the visual elements of Romantic theatre force us to reconsider the primarily textual theses that govern the idea of Romanticism, is both timely and needed. Its transdisciplinary approach, rooted jointly in performance studies and theatre history, promises to reassess the oft-denigrated 6th category of Aristotelian dramatic analysis and unpack spectacle’s aesthetic, political, and cultural significance, both on and off the stage. These are <i>the </i>most important voices in later-eighteenth-century and Romantic theatre studies, and to have them assembled promises readers that this will not just be a collection but a field-defining conversation.”</p>
Misty G. Anderson, James R. Cox Professor of English, University of Tennessee
<p>“A field-shaping collection of essays that unveil the lost delights of Romantic-era theatre culture: playbill typography, costume trimming, souvenir fans, toy theatres, stage makeup, mimodrama, and scene maquettes. Through their wide-ranging analyses, the contributors reanimate the stage productions that thrilled Romantic theatre-goers.”</p>
Judith Pascoe, George Mills Harper Professor of English, Florida State University
<p>"...Piccitto and Robinson's editorship of <i>The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830</i> is high-tier and a principal reason for the collection's readability and persuasiveness. Given the quality of writing and research one finds here, <i>The Visual Life</i> will generatively influence our understanding of Romantic theatre for years to come." </p>
- The Byron Journal,
<p>"The volume is a <i>tour de force</i>, bringing together a range of scholars who complement and challenge each other to open up the field of Romanticism to new forms of inquiry."</p>
Yasser Shams Khan, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
<p>"The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780–1830 is a robust collection of essays. With dozens of illustrations, its thirteen chapters offer a feast for the eyes and the mind. The book’s methodology is interdisciplinary with emphases on performance, transmedia, and cultural studies. Were <i>The Visual Life</i> an evening at the theater, it would include tragedy, comedy, melodrama, pantomime, and opera, star legitimate and illegitimate, male and female, and White and Black actors, and feature mise-en-scène prisons, moving statues, alluring costumes, enchanting music, nuanced lighting, ghostly presences, and background mirrors."</p>
Brian Bates, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
<p>“Taking its cue from scholars such as William Galperin, Sophie Thomas, Gillen D'Arcy Wood and others, who have expounded the importance of the visual for Romantic thinkers—not simply as a foil to the imagination, but as it relates to the bodily experience of seeing—this collection interrogates the complex visuality of the theater in this period, from stage spectacles and visual effects to elements of theatrical spectatorship employed in the work of William Blake.”</p>
Katie Noble, Studies in Romanticism
<p>“The volume brings an unprecedented critical attention to the visual elements of Romanic culture, to the history of scholarship on the visual in Romanticism, and to the existing range of archival material still available to scholars and awaiting further examination and analysis.”</p>
Thomas C. Crochunis, European Romantic Review
The Visual Life of Romantic Theater examines the dynamism and vibrancy of stage spectacle and its impact in an era of momentous social upheaval and aesthetic change. Situating theatrical production as key to understanding visuality ca. 1780-1830, this book places the stage front and center in Romantic scholarship by re-envisioning traditional approaches to artistic and social creation in the period. How, it asks, did dramaturgy and stagecraft influence aesthetic and sociopolitical concerns? How does a focus on visuality expand our understanding of the historical experience of theatergoing? In what ways did stage performance converge with visual culture beyond the theater? How did extratheatrical genres engage with theatrical sight and spectacle? Finally, how does a focus on dramatic vision change the way we conceive of Romanticism itself? The volume’s essays by emerging and established scholars provide exciting and suggestive answers to these questions, along with a more capacious conception of Romantic theater as a locus of visual culture that reached well beyond playhouse walls.
Provides fresh perspectives on the Romantic era through a focus on the visual nature and impact of the stage
Introduction
Romanticism, Visuality, and the Theater | Diane Piccitto and Terry F. Robinson
I. Imagined Scenes
1. The 1794 Macbeth and Its Conjuring Effects: Rethinking Romantic-Era Spectatorship | Terry F. Robinson
2. “Mind-Forg’d Manacles”: The Scenography of the Romantic Prison | Joseph Roach
3. Some Versions of Spectacle: Worldmaking and the Regency Toy Theater | Daniel O’Quinn
4. Conjuring the Space and the Right to Appear in Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) | Dana Van Kooy
II. Spectacular Bodies
5. “I Saw Othello’s Visage in His Mind”: Visualizing Othello in Nineteenth-Century British Theater | Atesede Makonnen
6. Playing “Alive”: Performing Sculpture on the Romantic Stage | Sophie Thomas
7. “Dresses in Hand”: Mary Rein’s Costume Workshop and the Spectacle of Romantic Theater | Susan E. Brown
8. The Singing Cat: British Audiences, Angelica Catalani, and the Threat of Opera | Uri Erman
III. Performances in Print
9. The Stage in a Page: A Visual Life of Romantic Playbills | Michael Gamer
10. Between Media: Harlequinade’s and Melodrama’s Visuality in Print | Deven M. Parker
11. Robert Blemmell Schnebbelie, Londina Illustrata, and the Visual Life of Regency Theater | Gillian Russell
12. Staging Satire: Gillray and “Caricatura-Sublime” | Heather McPherson
13. Theatrical Spectatorship in Byron’s Cain and Blake’s The Ghost of Abel: From Oblivion to Redemption | Diane Piccitto
Afterword
Romanticism Is Seeing Ghosts | Jonathan Mulrooney
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Diane Piccitto is Associate Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University.
Terry F. Robinson is Associate Professor of English and Drama at the University of Toronto.