scholarly journals “Irish Nights”: Paratheatrical Performances of Melodrama on and off the Belfast Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Phelan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Masses

Until relatively recently, melodrama has been an unfairly maligned genre of theatre history; its pejorative associations based on the prejudiced assumptions that its aesthetics of excess (in terms of its extravagant emotion, sensationalism and popularity amongst predominantly working class audiences) meant, therefore, that it was for simpletons. What Walter Benjamin excoriated as the “ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator” fuelled bourgeois disdain for this theatrical form and the derision of the Theatrical Inquisitor’s dismissal of melodrama as “aris[ing] from an inertness in the minds of the spectators, and a wish to be amused without the slightest exertion on their own parts, or any exercise whatever of their intellectual powers” remained the dominant critical response throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, such views continued well into the twentieth century and certainly characterized the modernist reactions of the founding figures of the Irish national theatre in this period. Frank Fay, cofounder of the National Dramatic Society, denounced both the aesthetics of Dublin's Queen's Theatre as the “home of the shoddiest kind of melodrama,” and the intelligence of its audiences who, “wouldn't, at present, understand anything else.”

Representations of Melodramatic Performance

1990 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 55-71
Author(s):  
Daniel Gerould
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Popular Theater ◽  
Popular Theatre ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Religious Festivals ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Of Greece

Among the reformers advocating a people's theater in the early twentieth century, there were those theorists of culture for the masses, like Romain Rolland and Anatolii Lunacharsky, who realized that to appeal to a broad audience a genuinely popular theatre must not only be uplifting and civic in spirit, but also entertaining. They recognized that such a popular theater already existed in the nineteenth century in the form of melodramatic performance: it had democratized the stage, brought the lower classes into the theatre, reduced the gap between the actor and the auditorium, and enabled the spectator to enter into the action, thereby creating a sense of communion (Bradby and McCormick 15–29). Rather than proposing a return to the sacred rituals of Greece or the religious festivals of the Middle Ages as the basis of a people's theater, they argued that melodramatic performance—purified of its commercialism and crudity—offered the model for a revolutionary new popular art.

Class and political action in nineteenth-century England: Theoretical and comparative perspectives

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Sociology ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The French Revolution

Political sociology has from its very inception had an overriding concern with the nature of political order and stability, and the threats to that stability. Ever since ‘the entry of the masses on to the stage of history’, at the time of the French Revolution, one source of that threat has regularly been seen as the industrial working class. That has been so, whether the threat was perceived by the liberal centre and conservative right; or whether is was converted, by the left, into a definite promise to overthrow ‘bourgeois’ stability. In both cases, in the anxious speculations of Mill and Tocqueville as much as the triumphant predictions of Marx and Engels, a key role was marked out for the developing working class of nineteenthcentury Europe.

Sacred Torrents in Modernity: German Jewish Philosophers and the Legacy of Secularization

transversal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44
Author(s):  
Nils Roemer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Critical Response ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Fault Lines ◽  
German Jewish

AbstractThis article investigates the ongoing interaction between the Jewish sacred past and its modern interpreters. Jewish thinkers from the eighteenth century reclaimed these ideals instead of dismissing them. Sacred traditions and modern secular thought existed in their mutual constitutive interdependence and not in opposition. When the optimism in historical progress and faith in reason unraveled in the fin de siècle, it engendered a new critical response by Jewish historians and philosophers of the twentieth century. These critical voices emerged within the fault lines of nineteenth and early twentieth century Jewish anti-historicist responses. What separated twentieth-century Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem from their nineteenth-century forerunners was not their embrace of religion but their critical stance toward reason and their crumbling faith in historical progress.

‘Know Whence You Came’: Dramatic Art and Black British Identity

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 253-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwame Kwei-Armah
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
British Identity ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Black British ◽  
Center Stage ◽  
History Of

Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Elmina's Kitchen was a landmark in British theatre history as the first drama by an indigenous black writer to be staged in London's commercial West End. The play's success since its premiere at the Royal National Theatre included a national tour and a season at Center Stage, Baltimore, directed by August Wilson's director Marion McClinton. In this interview with Deirdre Osborne, Kwei-Armah testifies to Wilson's considerable influence and the inspiration he derives from Wilson's project to account for the history of black people's experience in every decade of the twentieth century. Deirdre Osborne is a lecturer in drama at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and has published essays on the work of black British dramatists and poets including Kwame Kwei-Armah, Dona Daley, debbie tucker green, Lemn Sissay, SuAndi, and Roy Williams.

The Ideal Christmas Dinner

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
cathy kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
First Time ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
The Ideal

Christmas dinner emerged for the first time as an important and distinctive meal in mid-nineteenth century America, fueled by changing attitudes towards the Christmas holiday, changing meal patterns, and the need to unify Americans after the Civil War and to assimilate waves of immigrants. Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol provided an ideal template for meals centering on turkey and plum pudding, and that model has continued to inform many middle and working class tables. But by the end of the nineteenth century, cookery writers for the more affluent market began to disdain turkey at Christmas, and the uniform tapestry of Christmas foods began to unravel. Christmas dinner in twentieth-century America became more a statement of class than of national identity.

Hashishdom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Charles Baudelaire ◽  
Theophile Gautier ◽  
Ernst Bloch ◽  
Alexandre Dumas ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

By the 1840s cannabis was beginning to be used in Western societies, particularly in France and America; as the century progressed, it enjoyed some popularity among physicians and psychiatrists. By the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Ernst Bloch and particularly Walter Benjamin were experimenting with the drug. This chapter is a discussion of the reception and use of hashish, primarily in the nineteenth century. As well as exploring its relationship with the Orient in the minds of users, it discusses its emergence as a technology of transcendence. Of particular significance in this respect was the work of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, particularly The Hasheesh Eater. However, other figures are discussed, including Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, Alexandre Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire.

The Opera Machine

2019 ◽  
pp. 305-317
Author(s):  
Alexander Kluge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Power Station ◽  
Historical Relationship ◽  
Waste Removal ◽  
Alexander Kluge ◽  
The Masses

This chapter details the dialogue between Christian Schulte and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about opera's historical relationship to film. In Kluge's film The Power of Emotions (1983), he describes opera as a power station of emotions. He uses this image to talk about the nineteenth century, while in the first half of the twentieth century film took on the role of mobilizing and connecting the masses. He further explains that opera is a power station of emotions in the rather extreme sense insofar as it vicariously carries out emotional waste removal without actually being the power station. The power is generated elsewhere. Kluge then agrees that the opera is primarily defined through tragedy and fundamentally follows victim logic. When watching opera, the audience mainly watches a victim. In almost every opera one can make out a victim somewhere. This is a ritual in opera. One can also find mourning that comes with sacrifice as well as consolation. In this respect, the original, seventeenth-century operas were cast from the same rigid mold, one that cannot be changed for entertainment's sake.

Industrial urbanization, working-class lads and slang toponyms in early twentieth-century Helsinki

Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

THE DEAD STILL AMONG US: VICTORIAN SECULAR RELICS, HAIR JEWELRY, AND DEATH CULTURE

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lutz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Public ◽  
Look Back ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Death Culture ◽  
The Moment

By the time the nineteenth centuryreached its close, it was already possible to look back at Victorian death culture with nostalgia. With the rise of secularism, the slide toward what Diana Fuss has called the death of death had begun. No longer was it common practice to hold onto the remains of the dead. Rarely would a lock of hair be kept by, to be worn as jewelry, nor did one dwell on the deathbed scene, linger upon the lips of the dying to mark and revere those last words, record the minutiae of slipping away in memorials, diaries, and letters. Rooms of houses were increasingly less likely to hold remains; no one had died in the beds in which the living slept. Walter Benjamin, who wrote often about what was lost in the nineteenth century, sees the turning away from death as going hand in hand with the disappearance of the art of storytelling. Writing in the early 1930s, he called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because “today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death” (Illuminations94). Avoiding the sight of the dying, Benjamin argues, one misses the moment when life becomes narrative, when the meaning of life is completed and illuminated in its ending. He privileges the shared moment of death, when relatives, and even the public, gather around the dying to glean final words of wisdom, to know perhaps, in the end, the whole story. Historian of death Philippe Ariès describes a Christian account of the final ordeal of the death bed, when in the moment of death the salvation or damnation of the dying is determined, thus changing or freezing, for good, the meaning of the whole life. Scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century death culture tend, on the whole, to agree that towards the end of the century, a process that began earlier reached a completion – that the death of the other not only became less of a shared experience among a community, but last things such as final words and remains were increasingly to be pushed to the back of consciousness and hence to the lumber room of meaning and importance.

scholarly journals Employer, Industrial Housing and the Evolution of Company Welfare Policies in Britain's Heavy Industry: West Scotland, 1870–1920

1981 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Melling
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Heavy Industry ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Iron And Steel ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Building Activities

The history of working-class housing has become an imporatnt area of urban studies in recent years, as detailed investigations of building activities and property relations uncover the origins of housing initiatives. The growth of cities in the industrial North of England created their own peculiar building styles and housing problems, whilst the great metropolis of London continued to attract thousands of families into its eternal slums. There were also the new boom towns of manufacturing Britain, specialising in particular products as a regional division of productive expertise emerged. Swindon and Crewe flourished in the railway age of the nineteenth century, whilst Barrow and Jarrow belonged to a later period of iron and steel shipbuilding. The latter settlements were dominated not only by a few vital products, but by a handful of large companies with massive resources, which enabled them to undertake the housing of their first workers. These accounts may be complemented by the evidence of working-class dwellings in the early textile villages and larger industrial colonies of Lancashire and West Riding, or by the scattered documentation on the colliery villages which persisted through the major coal fields well into the twentieth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document