Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage (Studies in Theatre History and Culture) - Softcover

Barker, Roberta

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609388615 ISBN 13: 9781609388614

Verlag: University of Iowa Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

2023 Le Prix Ann Saddlemyer Award, Winner

Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Came´lias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimi` in La Bohe`me, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness.

The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Roberta Barker is associate professor of theatre in the Fountain School of Performing Arts, and member of the joint faculty of the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University. She is author of Early Modern Tragedy, Gender, and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery. Barker lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Iowa Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609388615
• ISBN 13: 9781609388614
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 295
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar