Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
- 220 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography
About this book
"Staging Memory and Materiality in Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography" examines theatrical biography as a nascent genre in eighteenth-century England. This study specifically focuses on Thomas Davies' 1780 memoir of David Garrick as the first moment of mastery in the genre's history, the three-way war for the right to tell Charles Macklin's story at the turn of the century and James Boaden's theatrical biography spree in the 1820s and 1830s, including the lives of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, Dorothy Jordan and Elizabeth Inchbald. This project investigates the extent to which biographers envisioned themselves as artists, inheriting the anxiety of impermanence and correlating fear of competition that plagued their thespian subjects. It traces a suggestive, but not determinative, outline of generic development, noting the shifting generic features that emerge in context of a given work's predecessors. Drawing heavily on primary sources, then-contemporary reviews and archival material in the form of extra-illustrated or "scrapbooked" editions of the biographies, this text is invested in the ways that the increasing emphasis on materiality was designed to consolidate, but often challenged, the biographer's authority. This turn to materiality also authorized readerly participation, allowing readers to "co-author" biographies through the use of material insertions, asserting their own presence in the texts about beloved thespians.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Series Information
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Competition and Legitimacy
- Chapter 1 “Davies’s Name […] In Fame’s Brightest Page Shall on Garrick Attend”: From Anonymous to Personalized Participation in the Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick
- Chapter 2 His Work, My Words: Anxiety And Competition in the Posthumous Lives of Charles Macklin, Comedian
- Chapter 3 Epistolary Resurrections: James Boaden and The Rise of the Professional Thespian Biographer
- Epilogue: The Limits of Materially Bound Permanence
- Notes
- References
- Index