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This collection of essays focuses on current theories of sensation and synaesthesia in films and audiovisual works from a variety of methodological perspectives. It offers an insightful exploration of recent film theories about the cinematic experience. Film spectatorship and its extension in new media as a similar form of audience enjoyment stimulates both our senses and mind by creating immersive environments that involve different levels of emotion and consciousness. The collection addresses these topics through its five sections. The first, “Perception,” focuses on the synaesthetic mechanism underpinning film perception and its connection with affect, cognition, and emotions. The sec...
From spoken word to ballet, ancient Greek and Roman epics regularly provide both the subjects and the form for emergent and seasoned theatre makers. This volume examines the 'why' of this epic turn, exploring not only the translation and scholarly histories of the epics, but also earlier performance traditions and recent theoretical debates.
Focusing on actresses in France during the early modern period, Virginia Scott examines how the stereotype of the actress has been constructed. The study then moves beyond that stereotype to detail the reality of the personal and artistic lives of women on the French stage, from the almost unknown Marie Ferré - who signed a contract for 12 livres a year in 1545 to perform the 'antiquailles de Rome or other histories, moralities, farces, and acrobatics' in the provinces - to the queens of the eighteenth-century Paris stage, whose 'adventures' have overshadowed their artistic triumphs. The book also investigates the ways in which actresses made invaluable contributions to the development of the French theatre in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and looks at the 'afterlives' of such women as Armande Béjart, Marquise Du Parc, Charlotte Desmares, Adrienne Lecouvreur, and Hippolyte Clairon in biographies, plays, and films.
Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and several other vernacular tragedians, together with consideration of neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and other playwrights. To what extent were similar themes, plots, structures and styles elaborated? How is difference as well as similarity to be accounted for? European drama is beginning to be considered outside of the singular vernacular frameworks in which it has been largely confined (as instanced in the conferences and volumes of essays held in the Universities of Munich and Berlin 2010-12), but...
Why have contemporary playwrights been obsessed by Shakespeare’s plays to such an extent that most of the canon has been rewritten by one rising dramatist or another over the last half century? Among other key figures, Edward Bond, Heiner Müller, Carmelo Bene, Arnold Wesker, Tom Stoppard, Howard Barker, Botho Strauss, Tim Crouch, Bernard Marie Koltès, and Normand Chaurette have all put their radical originality into the service of adapting four-century-old classics. The resulting works provide food for thought on issues such as Shakespearean role-playing, narrative and structural re-shuffling. Across the world, new writers have questioned the political implications and cultural stakes of...
In 1866, when the ballet La Source debuted, the public at the Paris Opera might have been content to dream about the setting in the verdant Caucasus, exotic Circassians, veiled Georgians, and powerful Khans. In the ballet's two plotlines, an ecological narrative of the death of the Source and the withering of the green world, and the competing interests of Muslim characters at war, this book finds not so much a timeless Orientalist fantasy as a timely commentary on colonial policy, institutional biopower, and human hybridity. In 1866, the daily and specialized humorist press showed a particular interest in the ballet's botany as shorthand for sex, as part of ongoing debates about libertine s...
Thomas Wynn explores how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, the mode of closet drama: plays that were never performed within the playhouse. Drawing on queer theory, Wynn argues that eighteenth-century closet reading fostered disruptive pleasures that imparted another side to the period's 'théâtromanie'.
Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-right absolutism of the Grand Siècle. But their works also speak to the modern imagination, inspiring reactions from Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault; adaptations and reworkings by Césaire and Kushner; and new productions by francophone and anglophone directors. This volume addresses both the history of French neoclassical tragedy--its audiences, performance practice, and development as a genre--and the ideas these works raise, such as necessity, free will, desire, power, and moral behavior in the face of limited choices. Essays demonstrate ways to teach the plays through a variety of lenses, such as performance, spectatorship, aesthetics, rhetoric, and affect. The book also explores postcolonial engagement, by writers and directors both in and outside France, with these works.
Performance Studies in Motion offers multiple perspectives on the current field of performance studies and suggests its future directions. Featuring new essays by pioneers Richard Schechner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and by international scholars and practitioners, it shows how performance can offer a new way of seeing the world, and testifies to the dynamism of this discipline. Beginning with an overview of the development of performance studies, the essays offer new insights into: contemporary experimental and postdramatic theatre; participatory performance and museum exhibitions; the performance of politicians, political institutions and grassroots protest movements; theatricality...
Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society’s definition of what is acceptable. Through the medieval epic poems Cantar de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo, the ballad tradition, Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, and Lope de Vega’s theatre, Geraldine Hazbun demonstrates that illegitimacy and legitimacy are interconnected and flexible categories defined in relation to marriage, sex, bodies, ethnicity, religion, lineage, and legacy. Both categories are subject to the uncertainties and freedoms of language and fiction and frequently constructed around axes of quantity and completeness. These literary texts, covering a range of illegitimate figures, some with an historical basis, demonstrate that truth, propriety, and standards of behaviour are not forged in the law code or the pulpit but in literature’s fluid system of producing meaning.