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Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-06-02
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 1107046300
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book establishes the significance of actresses, female playgoers and women critics in shaping Shakespeare's burgeoning reputation in the eighteenth century.
Author: Annie K. Smart
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2011-12-23
Total Pages: 363
ISBN-13: 1644531046
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Did women have a civic identity in eighteenth-century France? In Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, Annie Smart contends that they did. While previous scholarship has emphasized the ideal of domestic motherhood or the image of the republican mother, Smart argues persuasively that many pre-revolutionary and revolutionary texts created another ideal for women–the ideal of civic motherhood. Smart asserts that women were portrayed as possessing civic virtue, and as promoting the values and ideals of the public sphere. Contemporary critics have theorized that the eighteenth-century ideal of the Republic intentionally excluded women from the public sphere. According to this perspective, a discourse of “Rousseauean” domestic motherhood stripped women of an active civic identity, and limited their role to breastfeeding and childcare. Eighteenth-century France marked thus the division between a male public sphere of political action and a female private sphere of the home. Citoyennes challenges this position and offers an alternative model of female identity. This interdisciplinary study brings together a variety of genres to demonstrate convincingly that women were portrayed as civic individuals. Using foundational texts such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762), revolutionary gouaches of Lesueur, and vaudeville plays of Year II of the Republic (1793/1794), this study brilliantly shows that in text and image, women were represented as devoted to both the public good and their families. In addition, Citoyennes offers an innovative interpretation of the home. Through re-examining sphere theory, this study challenges the tendency to equate the home with private concerns, and shows that the home can function as a site for both private life and civic identity. Citoyennes breaks new ground, for it both rectifies the ideal of domestic Rousseauean motherhood, and brings a fuller understanding to how female civic identity operated in important French texts and images. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-04-19
Total Pages: 469
ISBN-13: 0521898609
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book examines Shakespeare's influence and popularity in all aspects of eighteenth-century literature, culture and society.
Author: Fiona Ritchie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-06-02
Total Pages: 267
ISBN-13: 1139868012
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Fiona Ritchie analyses the significant role played by women in the construction of Shakespeare's reputation which took place in the eighteenth century. The period's perception of Shakespeare as unlearned allowed many women to identify with him and in doing so they seized an opportunity to enter public life by writing about and performing his works. Actresses (such as Hannah Pritchard, Kitty Clive, Susannah Cibber, Dorothy Jordan and Sarah Siddons), female playgoers (including the Shakespeare Ladies Club) and women critics (like Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith and Elizabeth Inchbald), had a profound effect on Shakespeare's reception. Interdisciplinary in approach and employing a broad range of sources, this book's analysis of criticism, performance and audience response shows that in constructing Shakespeare's significance for themselves and for society, women were instrumental in the establishment of Shakespeare at the forefront of English literature, theatre, culture and society in the eighteenth century and beyond.
Author: Katherine West Scheil
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2012-05-15
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0801464692
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the late nineteenth century hundreds of clubs formed across the United States devoted to the reading of Shakespeare. From Pasadena, California, to the seaside town of Camden, Maine; from the isolated farm town of Ottumwa, Iowa, to Mobile, Alabama, on the Gulf coast, Americans were reading Shakespeare in astonishing numbers and in surprising places. Composed mainly of women, these clubs offered the opportunity for members not only to read and study Shakespeare but also to participate in public and civic activities outside the home. In She Hath Been Reading, Katherine West Scheil uncovers this hidden layer of intellectual activity that flourished in American society well into the twentieth century. Shakespeare clubs were crucial for women’s intellectual development because they provided a consistent intellectual stimulus (more so than was the case with most general women’s clubs) and because women discovered a world of possibilities, both public and private, inspired by their reading of Shakespeare. Indeed, gathering to read and discuss Shakespeare often led women to actively improve their lot in life and make their society a better place. Many clubs took action on larger social issues such as women’s suffrage, philanthropy, and civil rights. At the same time, these efforts served to embed Shakespeare into American culture as a marker for learning, self-improvement, civilization, and entertainment for a broad array of populations, varying in age, race, location, and social standing. Based on extensive research in the archives of the Folger Shakespeare Library and in dozens of local archives and private collections across America, She Hath Been Reading shows the important role that literature can play in the lives of ordinary people. As testament to this fact, the book includes an appendix listing more than five hundred Shakespeare clubs across America.
Author: Irene G. Dash
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Focusing on five Shakespeare plays, this book offers a fresh approach to the complex choices and decisions the women characters must face. Author Irene G. Dash scrutinizes stage productions over the centuries. Her exciting discoveries show the subtle ways the characters have been changed. By comparing promptbook versions from the eighteenth century to the present with the texts, Dash reveals how contemporary attitudes, spilling over into the theater, skew the works and diminish their breadth." "Questions multiply as women attempt to understand relationship between the power of others over their lives and their own decisions about the moral responsibility for action. Shakespeare dramatizes these ideas." "Dash shows how frequently such subtleties are lost on stage where roles are cut or reshaped, scenes transposed, or lines added. The author deftly analyzes the result of such changes. Lady Macbeth, for example, diminishes in complexity when the witches are transformed into dancing, singing choruses, or when Lady Macduff's murder disappears from the tragedy or when ironic lines are transformed. Comparing the seventeenth-century Davenant version and the twentieth-century Orson Welles film, Dash shows how these works illuminate Shakespeare's dramatic art."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Kate Rumbold
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-03-08
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 1316477894
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The eighteenth century has long been acknowledged as a pivotal period in Shakespeare's reception, transforming a playwright requiring 'improvement' into a national poet whose every word was sacred. Scholars have examined the contribution of performances, adaptations, criticism and editing to this process of transformation, but the crucial role of fiction remains overlooked. Shakespeare and the Eighteenth-Century Novel reveals for the first time the prevalence, and the importance, of fictional characters' direct quotations from Shakespeare. Quoting characters ascribe emotional and moral authority to Shakespeare, redeploy his theatricality, and mock banal uses of his words; by shaping in this way what is considered valuable about Shakespeare, the novel accrues new cultural authority of its own. Shakespeare underwrites, and is underwritten by, the eighteenth-century novel, and this book reveals the lasting implications for both of their reputations.
Author: Peter Sabor
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05
Total Pages: 202
ISBN-13: 1351900765
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In 1700, Shakespeare was viewed as one of the leading Renaissance playwrights, but not as supreme. By 1800, he was not only widely performed and read but celebrated as a universal genius and a national literary hero. What happened during the intervening years is the subject of this fascinating volume, which brings together Renaissance and eighteenth-century scholars who examine how Shakespeare gradually penetrated, and came to dominate, the culture and intellectual life of people in the English-speaking world. The contributors approach Shakespeare from a wide range of perspectives, to illuminate the way contemporary philosophy, science and medicine, textual practice, theatre studies, and literature both informed and were influenced by eighteenth-century interpretations of his works. Among the topics are Falstaff and eighteenth-century ideas of the sublime, David Garrick's 1756 adaptation of The Winter's Tale and its relationship to medical theories of femininity, the textual practices of George Steevens, Shakespeare's importance in furthering the careers of actors on the eighteenth-century stage, and the influence of Shakespeare on writers as diverse as Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, and Ann Radcliff. Together, the essays paint a vivid picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century Shakespeare and ideas about shared nationhood, knowledge, morality, history, and the self.
Author: Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 1980
Total Pages: 364
ISBN-13: 9780252010163
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