Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Collections & Series
  4. Content listing

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

41796 results in Collections

Page 617 of 2090

  • 12 - Melodrama and Empire

  • from III - Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 176-191

  • Summary

    Across the nineteenth century, melodrama visually and dramatically expressed the ideologies that motivated and sustained the nation’s imperial project. Spectacular, jingoistic, and intensely patriotic, melodrama translated imperial conflicts and conquests into timely and topical cultural productions that generally simplified complex cross-cultural engagements and current political and military events. Melodrama’s conventional framing translated a complicated political concept into familiar theatrical idioms, allowing audiences of all classes to make sense of themselves as citizens of an empire. The ideological and visual dynamics of imperialist melodrama were rooted in early nineteenth-century Orientalist fantasies, and slavery and nautical melodramas. As the form evolved, it became more visually spectacular and jingoistic in tone. Though late-century melodramas generally promoted a popular pro-imperialist sentiment, many also used the structures of the normative romance plot to reflect increasing public anxieties about the domestic impact of Britain’s foreign entanglements as well as doubts about Britain’s ability to maintain its empire in the face of new international rivalries.

  • 1 - On Isaiah Berlin

  • from Part I - Berlin the Man
  • Edited by Joshua L. Cherniss, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Steven B. Smith, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin
    Published online:
    21 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 11-12
    • Chapter
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • 8 - Melodramatic Acting

  • from II - Melodramatic Technique
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 112-125

  • Summary

    The explicit morality of melodrama and the hieratical organisation of the profession both demanded of its actors unambiguous characterisation and overt emotional expression. This tended to produce stereotypes, social and psychological, while expression drew on all the physical virtuosity of what George Henry Lewes described as ‘the symbols of the actor’s art’. This chapter relates the performer’s presence, gesture, and vocal expression as prescribed in acting manuals (e.g., Henry Siddons, Charles Bell, Henry Neville, and Gustave Garcia) to the psychology, science, and philosophy of the period, from Descartes’s Passions of the Soul to Diderot’s Paradox and Darwin’s Expression in Man and Animals. Particular attention is drawn to the theory and practice of François Delsarte. Acting in melodrama had to complement (or compete with) scenic spectacle and musical accompaniment. With the introduction of scenic naturalism later in the nineteenth century, extravagant gesture gave way to evocative stage business, but the need for unambiguous clarity of feeling and motivation remained. This is exemplified in the performance of Henry Irving in The Bells.

  • 18 - Psychoanalysis and Melodrama

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 277-288

  • Summary

    Psychoanalysis can be understood as a realisation of the theatrical aesthetics of melodrama, offering an acting out of psychic states and a return of the repressed that allow the full articulation of what is at stake in our emotional and moral lives. Melodrama anticipates the Freudian models of psychic functioning. At the same time, Freud himself seems to work toward ever more melodramatic and mythic formulation of the basic concepts of his psychology, so that his late work can have some of the aesthetic qualities of melodrama. D. W. Griffith and Marcel Proust offer further examples of the meeting of melodrama and psychoanalysis. Freud’s pursuit of a semiotics of the body, as in hysteria, recalls the similar project of the (melodramatic) novelist, Balzac, whose novel The Fatal Skin was in fact chosen by Freud as his final reading before his death.

Page 617 of 2090