Meredith Conti

Playing Sick (eBook, ePUB)

Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Taylor & Francis eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 232
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. Juli 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781351787703
• Artikelnr.: 55393777

Autorenporträt

Meredith Conti is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA. A historian of nineteenth-century theatre and performance, Conti's work has appeared in Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Victorian Medicine and Popular Culture (2015).

Inhaltsangabe

List of Figures. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Introduction. Part One:
Performing Consumption. Chapter One - Rosy Cheeks and Red Handkerchiefs:
Performing Camille's Consumption Before, During, and After the Contagionist
Turn. Chapter Two - Foreign Invaders: The Transatlantic Consumptives of
Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Part Two: Performing Drug Addiction.
Chapter Three - Early Dramaturgies of Drug Addiction in Stage Adaptations
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes. Chapter Four - Master,
Martyr, Monster: The Addict Archetypes of Richard Mansfield and William
Hooker Gillette. Part Three: Performing Mental Illness. Chapter Five - The
Madwoman in the Theatre: Normalizing the Disordered Female Mind in Ellen
Terry's Lyceum Repertoire. Chapter Six - Abortive Masculinity, Social
Decay, and Neuroticism in Henry Irving's Mad Roles. Conclusion. Index