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OverviewFew 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. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Meredith ContiPublisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd Imprint: Routledge Weight: 0.426kg ISBN: 9780367733919ISBN 10: 0367733919 Pages: 196 Publication Date: 18 December 2020 Audience: College/higher education , Tertiary & Higher Education Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsList 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. IndexReviewsAuthor InformationMeredith 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). Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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