Playing Sick - Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine

List of contents

List 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. Index

About the author

Meredith 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).

Summary

Playing Sick reconstructs how actors embodied three of the Victorian 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 dise

Product details

• Authors: Meredith Conti
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2020
• EAN: 9780367733919
• ISBN: 978-0-367-73391-9
• No. of pages: 196
• Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; MEDICAL / History, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, History of Medicine, Theatre Studies, United Kingdom, Great Britain, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General