Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910

Booth, Michael R.

doi:10.4324/9781315677866

Cited by 10 publications

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“…Archaeology thus directly shaped the Victorian theatre experience and suggested new ways of reading familiar plays. Michael R. Booth () has investigated the intimate relationship between stage historical dramas and archaeology—or what he calls “the archaeologising of spectacle” (p. 22). More recently, drawing from The Victorians and the Visual Imagination , in which Kate Flint () explores the “development of the visualization of experience,” Debbie Challis () describes the Greek Court at the Crystal Palace as “a good example of the desire to make the vision of antiquity corporeal and create an arena through which the past could be physically experienced and observed” (p. 54).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

Blumberg¹

2018

Literature Compass

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This article surveys recent scholarship tracing archaeological discourse in Victorian literature. While scholars in the past two decades have produced many valuable works investigating the Victorian literature of science, archaeology's disciplinary fluidity and infancy in the 19th century have relegated it often to a marginal place in studies of imperialism, museum culture, or limited to brief mentions in studies of Victorian Hellenism or Egyptology. Recent work, however, locates archaeology at the center of Victorian literary explorations of gender, sexuality, material culture, temporality, and aesthetic form. Tracing many of these studies, and suggesting future directions for scholarship, this essay reveals how Victorian writers turned to archaeology to understand themselves and their modernity.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

Blumberg¹

2018

Literature Compass

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“…No doubt, throughout the nineteenth century, the boundaries between melodrama and tragedy were murky, as melodramatic and sensational components regularly infiltrated tragic performances and texts. 21 For years, scholars have wrestled to assess the distinctions between these genres, and while in both the representation of suffering is a central component, melodrama is typically associated with a crude, exaggerated storyline and performance, in which, despite the victimising of virtue by villainy, the triumph of the righteous is inevitable. 22 The definitions of tragedy, however, are traditionally more dynamic and complex and may range from 'extremely sad' to 'a nexus of poetic components'.…”

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confidence: 99%

Miserable Kate: Femininity, Space and Literary Conventions in Representations of a Late‐Victorian Murder

Michael-Berger¹

2019

Gender & History

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Kate Marshall was sentenced to death and sent to Newgate to await her execution, which was due on Tuesday, 31 January 1899. Only a few days earlier, the forty-fouryear-old whip maker from Spitalfields, in London's East End, was convicted of the willful murder of her young sister, Elizabeth (Eliza) Roberts, who was stabbed to death in her Dorset Street room on 26 November 1898. Kate protested her innocence, claiming that it was her sister's husband who delivered the fatal blow. Nobody seemed to believe her. She, by then, had a long history of violence, and was already labelled, in the justice system as well as in the press, as a 'dangerous woman'. The fatal incident took place in the room where the sisters had been residing with Elizabeth's husband, David Roberts, a painter and decorator, and their three-year-old son. The sisters, who earned their living by making and selling whips, supposedly argued about their day's revenue whilst Roberts and the child were present in the room. Ultimately, Elizabeth was stabbed in the chest and died shortly afterwards. After standing trial at the Old Bailey, Kate was found guilty. Three days before the carrying out of the execution, the Home Secretary advised the queen to respite the capital punishment with a view to its commutation to penal servitude.Many studies have demonstrated the importance of gender in the administration of criminal justice in turn of the century England. 1 Martin Wiener has argued that gender increasingly tended to be a factor in women's favour with judges, lawyers, juries, as well as with the press and public, and that newspaper reporting had become a significant venue for debating ideologies related to gender, class and accountability. Moreover, the press played an increasing role in criminal justice. 2 Wiener has demonstrated that late Victorian 'professional' men of law often believed that women had less power of self-control than men, and that they were inclined to act violently, under the influence of overwhelming emotions. Thus, women had become less liable to execution. 3 Trials where women were accused of murder, and their press coverage, then, offered 'cultural moments' to define gender roles and expectations, as well as femininity. 4 Ginger Frost's article on the 1902 Kitty Byron case, in which a working-class young woman was accused of murdering her lover with a knife, demonstrates how, in both the trial

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“…2Among a vast literature on nineteenth-century melodrama, see primarily Booth (1965), (1981), (1991) 150–61; Meisel (1983); Brooks (1995); Hays and Nikolopoulou (1996); Moody (2000). …”

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confidence: 99%

INCREDVLVS ODI: HORACE AND THE SUBLITERARY AESTHETIC OF THE AUGUSTAN STAGE

Lada‐Richards

2019

Camb. class. j.

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Starting from the comparative standpoint of elite hostility to nineteenth-century British melodrama, this article posits pantomime's ‘melodramatic’ mode of exhibitionist excess as one of the missing links in the landscape against which Horace composed his Ars poetica. It suggests that lines 182–8 of the Ars that disapprove the display of death, violence and physical impossibilities on the tragic stage may be better understood as Horace's hostile response to pantomime's increasing prominence in Roman theatrical life, more precisely to the dislocation of ‘horror’ and ‘marvel’ from the realm of the ‘heard’ to that of the ‘seen’ favoured by the pantomime genre.

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Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

Miserable Kate: Femininity, Space and Literary Conventions in Representations of a Late‐Victorian Murder

INCREDVLVS ODI: HORACE AND THE SUBLITERARY AESTHETIC OF THE AUGUSTAN STAGE

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