Sign-In
Cart
Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the Restoration and Beyond
Hardcover
Literary CriticismTheater HistoryPlays
ISBN13: 9781501751585
Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr
Published: Nov 15 2020
Pages: 330
Weight: 1.41
Height: 0.88 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Ways of the World explores cosmopolitanism as it emerged during the Restoration and the role theater played in both memorializing and satirizing its implications and consequences. Rooted in the Stuart ambition to raise the status of England through two crucial investments--global traffic, including the slave trade, and cultural sophistication--this intensified global orientation led to the creation of global mercantile networks and to the rise of an urban British elite who drank Ethiopian coffee out of Asian porcelain at Ottoman-inspired coffeehouses. Restoration drama exposed cosmopolitanism's most embarrassing and troubling aspects, with such writers as Joseph Addison, Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and William Wycherley dramatizing the emotional and ethical dilemmas that imperial and commercial expansion brought to light.
Altering standard narratives about Restoration drama, Laura J. Rosenthal shows how the reinvention of theater in this period--including technical innovations and the introduction of female performers--helped make possible performances that held the actions of the nation up for scrutiny, simultaneously indulging and ridiculing the violence and exploitation being perpetuated. In doing so, Ways of the World reveals an otherwise elusive consistency between Restoration genres (comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy), disrupts conventional understandings of the rise and reception of early capitalism, and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical culture in the context of the shifting political realities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain.
Also in
Plays
Four Comedies: The Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night
Shakespeare, William
Paperback
Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem
Miller, Arthur
Paperback
The Laramie Project and the Laramie Project: Ten Years Later
Kaufman, Moises
Fondakowski, Leigh
Pierotti, Greg
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Euripides
Aeschylus
Sophocles
Paperback
FRANKENSTEIN or The Modern Prometheus (The Revised 1831 Edition - Wisehouse Classics)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paperback
Four Major Plays: A Doll's House/Ghosts/Hedda Gabler/The Master Builder
McFarlane, James
Arup, Jens
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
A Doll's House and Other Plays: With Pillars of the Community, Ghosts and an Enemy of the People
Ibsen, Henrik
Paperback
KJV, Pew Bible, Large Print, Hardcover, Burgundy, Red Letter Edition (Large Print Edition)
Thomas Nelson
Hardcover