Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England

Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England
Author: Jim Davis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2015-10-08
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 131643236X

The popularity of the comic performers of late-Georgian and Regency England and their frequent depiction in portraits, caricatures and prints is beyond dispute, yet until now little has been written on the subject. In this unique study Jim Davis considers the representation of English low comic actors, such as Joseph Munden, John Liston, Charles Mathews and John Emery, in the visual arts of the period, the ways in which such representations became part of the visual culture of their time, and the impact of visual representation and art theory on prose descriptions of comic actors. Davis reveals how many of the actors discussed also exhibited or collected paintings and used painterly techniques to evoke the world around them. Drawing particularly on the influence of Hogarth and Wilkie, he goes on to examine portraiture as critique and what the actors themselves represented in terms of notions of national and regional identity.

Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture

Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture
Author: Oskar Cox Jensen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2018
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0198812426

This volume examines Charles Dibdin's extraordinarily wide-ranging career as an actor, lyricist, composer, singer-songwriter, comedian, theatre-manager, journalist, artist, music tutor, speculator, and author, and offers fresh insights into late Georgian culture, society, and politics.

Bodies of Information

Bodies of Information
Author: Chris Mounsey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2019-11-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000734706

Bodies of Information initiates the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by encompassing interdisciplinary Bioethical discussions on a wide range of descriptions of bodies in relation to their contexts from varying perspectives: including literary analysis, sociology, criminology, anthropology, osteology and cultural studies, to read a variety of types of artefacts, from the Romano-British period to Hip Hop. Van Rensselaer Potter coined the phrase Global Bioethics to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter’s founding vision from historical perspectives, and asks, how did we get here from then?

The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London

The Ballad-Singer in Georgian and Victorian London
Author: Oskar Cox Jensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2021-02-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108830560

An in-depth study of the nineteenth-century London ballad-singer, a central figure in British cultural, social and political life.

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830

The Visual Life of Romantic Theater, 1780-1830
Author: Diane Piccitto
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2023-05-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472129767

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.

The Art of Entertainment

The Art of Entertainment
Author: Jason Price
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2024-04-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1040020712

In this book, theatre historian Jason Price looks at the relationships and exchanges that took place between high and low cultural forms in Britain from 1880 to 1940, focusing on the ways in which figures from popular entertainments, such as music hall serio-comics, clowns, and circus acrobats, came to feature in modern works of art. Readers with an interest in art, theatre, and the history of modern Britain will find Price’s approach, which sees major works of art used to illuminate the histories of once-famous entertainers and the wider social, political, and cultural landscape of this period, accessible and engaging. The book will bring to life for readers some of the most vivid works of modern British art and reveal how individuals historically overlooked due to their gender, sexuality, or race played a significant role in the shaping of British culture during this period of monumental social change.

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire

A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire
Author: Matthew Kaiser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350187801

Drawing together contributions from scholars in a range of fields within 19th- and 20th-century cultural, literary, and theater studies, this volume provides a thorough and varied overview of the many forms comedy took in the 19th century. Given the earth-shattering cultural changes and political events that mark the decades between 1800 and 1920-shifting borders, socioeconomic upheaval, scientific and technological innovation, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, unprecedented overseas expansion by European and American imperial powers-it is no wonder that people in the Age of Empire turned to comedy in order to make sense of the contradictions that structure modern identity and navigate the sociocultural fault lines within modern life. Comical, humorous, and satirical cultural artifacts from the period capture the anxieties and aspirations, the petty resentments and lofty ideals, of a world buffeted by change. This volume explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of comedy in the context of blackface minstrelsy, nonsense poetry, music hall and pantomime, comic almanacs and joke books, journalism, silent film, popular novels, and hygiene magazines, among other phenomena. It also provides a detailed account of contentious debates among social Darwinists, psychoanalysts, and political philosophers about the meaning and significance of comedy and laughter to human life. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identity, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight divergent approaches to comedy in the Age of Empire add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture
Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 769
Release: 2016-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191082090

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.