Theatre Fiction In Britain From Henry James To Doris Lessing

Download or read book Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing written by Graham Wolfe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume posits and explores an intermedial genre called theatre-fiction, understood in its broadest sense as referring to novels and stories that engage in concrete and sustained ways with theatre. Though theatre has made star appearances in dozens of literary fictions, including many by modern history’s most influential authors, no full-length study has dedicated itself specifically to theatre-fiction—in fact there has not even been a recognized name for the phenomenon. Focusing on Britain, where most of the world’s theatre-novels have been produced, and commencing in the late-nineteenth century, when theatre increasingly took on major roles in novels, Theatre-Fiction in Britain argues for the benefits of considering these works in relation to each other, to a history of development, and to the theatre of their time. New modes of intermedial analysis are modelled through close studies of Henry James, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, J. B. Priestley, Ngaio Marsh, Angela Carter, and Doris Lessing, all of whom were deeply involved in the theatre-world as playwrights, directors, reviewers, and theorists. Drawing as much on theatre scholarship as on literary theory, Theatre-Fiction in Britain presents theatre-fiction as one of the past century’s most vital means of exploring, reconsidering, and bringing forth theatre’s potentials.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction written by Graham Wolfe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Novelists have long been attracted to theatre. Some have pursued success on the stage, but many have sought to combine these worlds, entering theatre through their fiction, setting stages on their novels’ pages, and casting actors, directors, and playwrights as their protagonists. The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction has convened an international community of scholars to explore the remarkable array of novelists from many eras and parts of the world who have created fiction from the stuff of theatre, asking what happens to theatre on the pages of novels, and what happens to novels when they collaborate with theatre. From J. W. Goethe to Louisa May Alcott, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Atwood, some of history’s most influential novelists have written theatre-fiction, and this Companion discusses many of these figures from new angles. But it also spotlights writers who have received less critical attention, such as Dorothy Leighton, Agustín de Rojas Villandrando, Ronald Firbank, Syed Mustafa Siraj, Li Yu, and Vicente Blasco Ibañez, bringing their work into conversation with a vital field. A valuable resource for students, scholars, and admirers of both theatre and novels, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction offers a wealth of new perspectives on topics of increasing critical concern, including intermediality, theatricality, antitheatricality, mimesis, diegesis, and performativity.

Download or read book Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation written by Matthew Vechinski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twentieth-Century American Fiction in Circulation is a study of the twentieth-century linked story collection in the United States. It emphasizes how the fictional form grew out of an established publishing model—individual stories printed in magazines, revised and expanded into single-author volumes that resemble novels—which creates multiple contexts for the reception of this literature. By acknowledging the prior appearance of stories in periodicals, the book examines textual variants and the role of editorial emendation, drawing on archival records (drafts and correspondence) whenever possible. It also considers how the pages of magazines create a context for the reception of short stories that differs significantly from that of the single-author book. The chapters explore how short stories, appearing separately then linked together, excel at representing the discontinuity of modern American life; convey the multifaceted identity of a character across episodes; mimic the qualities of oral storytelling; and illustrate struggles of belonging within and across communities. The book explains the appearance and prevalence of these narrative strategies at particular cultural moments in the evolution of the American magazine, examining a range of periodicals such as The Masses, Saturday Evening Post, Partisan Review, Esquire, and Ladies’ Home Journal. The primary linked story collections studied are Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), William Faulkner’s The Unvanquished (1938), Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps (1942), John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968), and Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1988).

Download or read book Greasepaint Puritan written by Maya Cantu and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Each of Ropes's long-forgotten novels was inspired by his own experiences as a performer, and focused on the lives of gay men in show business, offering rare glimpses into backstage Broadway. But why did Ropes's body of work, and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into such obscurity? Greasepaint Puritan aims to find out and reclaim his story. Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the "Proper Bostonian" life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. We follow Ropes's successful career as both a performer and the author of the trilogy of backstage novels: 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes's career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and '40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street--but Greasepaint Puritan restores the "forgotten melody" of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.

Download or read book Baroque Lorca written by Andrés Pérez-Simón and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba). Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Download or read book French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK written by Irving Goh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection presents a sort of counter-history or counter-genealogy of the globalization of French thought from the point of view of scholars working in the UK. While the dominating discourse would attribute the US as the source of that globalization, particularly through the 1966 conference on the Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man at Johns Hopkins University, this volume of essays serves as a reminder that the UK has also been a principal motor of that globalization. The essays take into account how French thought and literary theory have institutionally taken shape in the UK from the 70s to today, highlight aspects of French thought that have been of particular pertinence or importance for scholars there, and outline how researchers in the UK today are bringing French thought further in terms of teaching and research in this twenty-first century. In short, this volume traces how the country has been behind the reception and development of French thought in Anglophone worlds from the late 70s to the present.

Download or read book Twentieth-Century Literary Encounters in China written by Jeffrey Mather and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-10 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the travel writing of the eccentric plant collector and Reginald Farrer, to Emily Hahn’s insider depictions of bohemian life in semi-colonial Shanghai, to Ezra Pound’s mediated ‘journeys’ to Southwest China via the explorer Joseph Rock – Anglo-American representations of China during the first half of the twentieth century were often unconventional in terms of style, form, and content. By examining a range of texts that were written in the flux of travel – including poems, novels, autobiographies – this study argues that the tumultuous social and political context of China’s Republican Period (1912-49) was a key setting for conceptualizing cultural modernity in global and transnational terms. In contrast with accounts that examine China’s influence on Western modernism through language, translation, and discourse, the book recovers a materialist engagement with landscapes, objects, and things as transcribed through travel, ethnographic encounter, and embodied experience. The book is organized by three themes which suggest formal strategies through which notions cultural modernity were explored or contested: borderlands, cosmopolitan performances, and mobile poetics. As it draws from archival sources in order to develop these themes, this study offers a place-based historical perspective on China’s changing status in Western literary cultures.