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22038 results in Cambridge Companions

Page 292 of 1102

The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates
  • Edited by Peter E. Pormann
  • Published online:
    31 October 2018
    Print publication:
    08 November 2018
  • Hippocrates is a towering figure in Greek medicine. Dubbed the 'father of medicine', he has inspired generations of physicians over millennia in both the East and West. Despite this, little is known about him, and scholars have long debated his relationship to the works attributed to him in the so-called 'Hippocratic Corpus', although it is undisputed that many of the works within it represent milestones in the development of Western medicine. In this Companion, an international team of authors introduces major themes in Hippocratic studies, ranging from textual criticism and the 'Hippocratic question' to problems such as aetiology, physiology and nosology. Emphasis is given to the afterlife of Hippocrates from Late Antiquity to the modern period. Hippocrates had as much relevance in the fifth-century BC Greek world as in the medieval Islamic world, and he remains with us today in both medical and non-medical contexts.

The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory
  • Edited by Matthew Garrett
  • Published online:
    19 October 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2018
  • Narrative theory is essential to everything from history to lyric poetry, from novels to the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Narrative theory explores how stories work and how we make them work. This Companion is both an introduction and a contribution to the field. It presents narrative theory as an approach to understanding all kinds of cultural production: from literary texts to historiography, from film and videogames to philosophical discourse. It takes the long historical view, outlines essential concepts, and reflects on the way narrative forms connect with and rework social forms. The volume analyzes central premises, identifies narrative theory's feminist foundations, and elaborates its significance to queer theory and issues of race. The specially commissioned essays are exciting to read, uniting accessibility and rigor, traditional concerns with a renovated sense of the field as a whole, and analytical clarity with stylistic dash. Topical and substantial, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory is an engaging resource on a key contemporary concept.

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams
  • Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018
  • This newly commissioned series of essays by leading scholars is the first volume to offer both an overview of the field and also current emerging critical views on the history, form, and influence of English melodrama. Authoritative voices provide an introduction to melodrama's early formal features such as tableaux and music, and trace the development of the genre in the nineteenth century through the texts and performances of its various sub-genres, the theatres within which the plays were performed, and the audiences who watched them. The historical contexts of melodrama are considered through essays on topics including contemporary politics, class, gender, race, and empire. And the extensive influences of melodrama are demonstrated through a wide-ranging assessment of its ongoing and sometimes unexpected expressions - in psychoanalysis, in other art forms (the novel, film, television, musical theatre), and in popular culture generally - from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

  • 6 - Theatres and Their Audiences

  • from I - Histories of English Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 78-92

  • Summary

    There was no generic audience for English melodrama. Audiences varied by theatre and changed as the nineteenth century progressed; their social background ranged from royalty to the working classes. Melodrama provided emotional and visceral thrills for its audiences, but also enabled them to negotiate with modernity and the many problems it engendered. Despite its entertainment value, it did not instil passivity among its spectators. In London it attracted audiences to the West End, East End and to theatres south of the Thames, while it was also very popular in the provinces. Certain theatres were particularly associated with melodrama, such as Drury Lane and the Adelphi theatres in London’s West End in the latter years of the nineteenth century. The Surrey in south London and the Pavilion in east London were particularly renowned for nautical drama, while the Adelphi Theatre was associated with Boucicault’s sensation melodramas in the early 1860s. Although contemporary journalists tended to describe melodrama audiences in very formulaic ways, we should be wary of their constructions. Melodrama audiences were diverse and reacted to the genre in very different ways.

  • 17 - Melodrama and the Modern Musical

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 262-276

  • Summary

    Like so much of Modernism’s rejection of the Victorians, the twentieth-century musical too has tried to assert its modernity by setting itself apart from its ancestor; but the modern musical’s many-threaded debt to Victorian melodrama is a tangled one. Three shows, Oklahoma!, Show Boat, and The Black Crook, are often credited as the first modern musical: all engage Victorian melodrama in multiple ways. Meanwhile, Oliver! and Sweeney Todd exemplify both the modern musical’s debt to melodrama and its effort to distance itself from that debt. These musicals not only employ conventions drawn from theatrical melodrama but also derive from Victorian novels, Oliver Twist and The String of Pearls, that were already both influenced by, and had contributed to, Victorian stage melodrama. Upon their initial publication (or even during serialisation), both were immediately adapted to the Victorian melodrama stage, setting up complex lines of inheritance, demonstrating the intertwined set of relationships among each novel, melodrama, film, and musical. Tracing these lines reveals the degree to which the modern musical, for all its innovations, is fundamentally a reshaping of Victorian melodrama.

  • 12 - Melodrama and Empire

  • from III - Melodrama and Nineteenth-Century English Culture
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 176-191

  • Summary

    Across the nineteenth century, melodrama visually and dramatically expressed the ideologies that motivated and sustained the nation’s imperial project. Spectacular, jingoistic, and intensely patriotic, melodrama translated imperial conflicts and conquests into timely and topical cultural productions that generally simplified complex cross-cultural engagements and current political and military events. Melodrama’s conventional framing translated a complicated political concept into familiar theatrical idioms, allowing audiences of all classes to make sense of themselves as citizens of an empire. The ideological and visual dynamics of imperialist melodrama were rooted in early nineteenth-century Orientalist fantasies, and slavery and nautical melodramas. As the form evolved, it became more visually spectacular and jingoistic in tone. Though late-century melodramas generally promoted a popular pro-imperialist sentiment, many also used the structures of the normative romance plot to reflect increasing public anxieties about the domestic impact of Britain’s foreign entanglements as well as doubts about Britain’s ability to maintain its empire in the face of new international rivalries.

  • 1 - On Isaiah Berlin

  • from Part I - Berlin the Man
  • Edited by Joshua L. Cherniss, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Steven B. Smith, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin
    Published online:
    21 September 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 11-12
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  • 8 - Melodramatic Acting

  • from II - Melodramatic Technique
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 112-125

  • Summary

    The explicit morality of melodrama and the hieratical organisation of the profession both demanded of its actors unambiguous characterisation and overt emotional expression. This tended to produce stereotypes, social and psychological, while expression drew on all the physical virtuosity of what George Henry Lewes described as ‘the symbols of the actor’s art’. This chapter relates the performer’s presence, gesture, and vocal expression as prescribed in acting manuals (e.g., Henry Siddons, Charles Bell, Henry Neville, and Gustave Garcia) to the psychology, science, and philosophy of the period, from Descartes’s Passions of the Soul to Diderot’s Paradox and Darwin’s Expression in Man and Animals. Particular attention is drawn to the theory and practice of François Delsarte. Acting in melodrama had to complement (or compete with) scenic spectacle and musical accompaniment. With the introduction of scenic naturalism later in the nineteenth century, extravagant gesture gave way to evocative stage business, but the need for unambiguous clarity of feeling and motivation remained. This is exemplified in the performance of Henry Irving in The Bells.

  • 18 - Psychoanalysis and Melodrama

  • from IV - Extensions of Melodrama
  • Edited by Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, New Jersey
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
    Published online:
    06 October 2018
    Print publication:
    04 October 2018, pp 277-288

  • Summary

    Psychoanalysis can be understood as a realisation of the theatrical aesthetics of melodrama, offering an acting out of psychic states and a return of the repressed that allow the full articulation of what is at stake in our emotional and moral lives. Melodrama anticipates the Freudian models of psychic functioning. At the same time, Freud himself seems to work toward ever more melodramatic and mythic formulation of the basic concepts of his psychology, so that his late work can have some of the aesthetic qualities of melodrama. D. W. Griffith and Marcel Proust offer further examples of the meeting of melodrama and psychoanalysis. Freud’s pursuit of a semiotics of the body, as in hysteria, recalls the similar project of the (melodramatic) novelist, Balzac, whose novel The Fatal Skin was in fact chosen by Freud as his final reading before his death.

Page 292 of 1102