Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Place of Publication, Distribution, etc.
Milton :
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
Routledge,
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2018.
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Specific Material Designation and Extent of Item
1 online resource (233 pages)
SERIES
Series Title
Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies
INTERNAL BIBLIOGRAPHIES/INDEXES NOTE
Text of Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Cover; Half Title; Series Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication Page; Table of Contents; List of Figures; Abbreviations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; An illness lived; An illness performed; Notes; Bibliography; Part I: Performing consumption; Chapter 1: Rosy cheeks and red handkerchiefs: Performing Camille's consumption before, during, and after the contagionist turn; The making of the consumptive myth; Unmaking the consumptive myth; Scripting consumption in Dumas's La dame aux camé lias; Playing the romantic disease; Playing clinical tuberculosis; Notes; Bibliography.
Text of Note
"A mind diseased" in Ellen Terry's Lyceum repertoireThe hysteric and the madwoman; Notes; Bibliography; Chapter 6: Neurotic princes and enfeebled kings: Stigmatizing male mental illness in Henry Irving's mad roles; Mathias, 1871; Hamlet, 1878; King Lear, 1892; Irving's emasculated madmen; The doctor is out: The closing of the Lyceum laboratory; Notes; Bibliography; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
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Adapting addiction for the late nineteenth-century popular stageLove in the time of narcotics; Notes; Bibliography; Chapter 4: Master, martyr, monster: The addict archetypes of William Hooker Gillette and Richard Mansfield; Dosing and detecting in Gillette's Sherlock Holmes; "His failure is a disease": Virtue and vice in Mansfield's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; The anatomy of a fin-de-siè cle addict; Notes; Bibliography; Part II: Performing mental illness; Chapter 5: The madwoman in the theatre: Normalizing the disordered female mind in Ellen Terry's Lyceum repertoire.
Text of Note
Chapter 2: Foreign invasions: The transatlantic consumptives of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora DuseThe sublime and the grotesque in Bernhardt's neo-romantic Camille; The myth unmasked: Eleonora Duse's naturalistic Marguerite; Camille and the death of consumptive sentiment; Notes; Bibliography; Part II: Performing drug addiction; Chapter 3: Early dramaturgies of drug addiction in stage adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes; The nineteenth-century pharmacopeia; Imagining addiction in the late nineteenth century.
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SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period's British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors' repertoires. Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era's most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such depictions confirmed or resisted salient constructions of diseases and the diseased. Conti's case studies, which range from Eleonora Duse's portrayal of the consumptive courtesan Marguerite Gautier to Henry Irving's performance of senile dementia in King Lear, help to illuminate the interdependence of medical science and theatre in constructing nineteenth-century illness narratives. Through reconstructing these performances, Conti isolates from the period's acting practices a lexicon of embodied illness: a flexible set of physical and vocal techniques that performers employed to theatricalize the sick body. In an age when medical science encouraged a gradual decentering of the patient from their own diagnosis and treatment, late nineteenth-century performances of illness symbolically restored the sick to positions of visibility and consequence.
ACQUISITION INFORMATION NOTE
Source for Acquisition/Subscription Address
Ingram Content Group
Stock Number
9781351787703
OTHER EDITION IN ANOTHER MEDIUM
Title
Playing Sick : Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine.
International Standard Book Number
9781138703117
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Diseases in the theater-- Great Britain-- History-- 19th century.
English drama-- 19th century-- History and criticism.