{"title":"Book Review: Japonisme and the Birth of Cinema by Daisuke Miyao","authors":"Alexander Jacoby","doi":"10.1177/17483727211063114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211063114","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125651134","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: The Origins of the Star System: Persona, Publicity, and Economics in Early Cinema by Andrew Shail","authors":"Charles Keil","doi":"10.1177/17483727211062086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211062086","url":null,"abstract":"Shibata shot ‘street scenes’ as well as theatrical adaptations as early as 1959, by Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie in the first English-language history of Japanese cinema; and, indeed, several of the Lumière films shot in Japan were screened as part of a major retrospective of Japanese silent cinema at Pordenone, Italy, in 2001. Despite these small criticisms, this is a fascinating book, well researched and well illustrated, which sheds light on an important two-way intersection between Japanese and Western artistic cultures and on how that intersection shaped the techniques, imagery and narrative strategies of an emerging artistic medium.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"118 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116346662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Melodrama's Modern","authors":"C. Gledhill","doi":"10.1177/17483727211039464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211039464","url":null,"abstract":"Confronting the paradox of melodrama as an apparently outdated Victorian stage form now argued as the overarching modality of modern screen fiction, this essay rethinks the nature of melodrama's 'modern' as an aesthetic modality capable of channelling the social through individual protagonists. Devising staging and plotting that foregrounds emotional and moral consequences of actions, and drawing on musicalisation of performance and word to embody feeling, the melodramatic mode creates haptic connection with audiences, inviting empathy with the sensations and 'human interest' of other's experiences, while it discursively binds the social into the personal in the acculturated images, turns of speech, and cultural references through which its characters' emotions and actions are expressed. Arguing shifting criteria of verisimilitude under pressure of changing social conditions and emergence of new technologies, the essay shows how melodrama's personalisation of the social evolves in modern screen media through the resources of cinematography.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134089297","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pets, People, and the Enduring ‘Dogaturgy’ of Nineteenth-Century Dog Dramas","authors":"A. Hughes","doi":"10.1177/17483727211040180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211040180","url":null,"abstract":"Dogs began playing new roles as emotional companions in Eurowestern households during the mid-1800s; by the 1880s, dogs were widely considered ‘family members’ in middle-class homes. The nineteenth-century ‘dog drama’, a type of melodrama, helps illuminate how, when, and why this attitudinal change occurred. The transatlantic appeal of dog dramas (such as René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's 1814 melodrama The Dog of Montargis) and performers who specialised in the genre (such as U.S. actor-entrepreneur Edwin Blanchard) suggest that sentimental stories about dogs appealed to working-class people as well. These plays reflected, and perhaps contributed to, changing views about dogs during the nineteenth century. The dog drama and its afterlives (in film, television, and social media) shed light on both the good intentions and troubling contradictions inherent in humans’ relationships with nonhuman animals, especially pets.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130346818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Echoes and Whispers: Becoming Modern with Elizabeth Polack","authors":"Sharon Aronofsky Weltman","doi":"10.1177/17483727211036865","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211036865","url":null,"abstract":"Elizabeth Polack (fl. 1834–1843) is the earliest known Jewish woman playwright in Britain. In this essay, I detail the historiographical difficulties in researching Polack's lost play The Echo of Westminster Bridge (1835), which lived vibrantly in cultural memory for a century even though the play itself disappeared and its author receded into obscurity. One problem with becoming modern is confronting the increasing inaccessibility of the past. I demonstrate that, notwithstanding some confusion about authorship, Echo is by Polack and that her melodrama made a long-standing impact. I delineate the special problems associated with using a twenty-page Skelt's toy theatre condensation of the full-length stage play to reconstruct some of its main features. Then I speculate that – like Polack's best-known play, Esther, The Royal Jewess (1835) – Polack's The Echo of Westminster Bridge also potentially nudges forward the cause of Jewish emancipation. But how can one study a play that was popular and influential but has ceased to exist? That metacritical problem – the ephemerality of theatre and its compounding challenges for research – is part of the condition of the modern.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127244848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Between: British and American Melodrama and Modernity","authors":"Matthew Buckley","doi":"10.1177/17483727211039455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211039455","url":null,"abstract":"This essay assesses the current state of scholarship on British and American melodrama and introduces the cluster of articles on that topic that follow. It suggests that recent advances in the field have made evident the trans-cultural, trans-medial and reproductive nature of melodrama as an art, re-focusing critical attention on melodrama's performance, production and formal evolution not within but among, and by movement between, the different cultures, media, creators, audiences, forms and works it involved. Drawing attention to British and American melodrama's critical role in this vast, largely unrecovered history of relational, migrational and reiterative creation, and noting the immediate challenges such a history presents to critical understanding and study, the essay describes the manner in which each of the cluster's articles responds to those new challenges and the ways in which, both individually and as a group, they have begun to lend that history more clarity.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132551895","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To Catch a Joke Thief, or Copyrighting Vaudeville Acts in the New York Clipper Registry","authors":"M. McMahan","doi":"10.1177/17483727211029246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211029246","url":null,"abstract":"In the early part of the twentieth century, the trade publication the New York Clipper created a way for vaudeville artists to claim priority over acts, songs, plays, jokes, and even concepts. The initiative tells us a great deal about the limited legal options facing vaudevillians at the time period as well as the dubious nature of codifying non-dramatic performance acts as clearly defined, own-able, and protectable intellectual property. Drawing on newspaper clippings from Billboard, Variety, and the New York Clipper, as well as rare documents from the American Comedy Archives, this paper offers a look at the American press’s attempt to intervene. It also provides an exploration of a number of rare jokes, gags, novelty acts over which vaudevillians claimed exclusive rights. Ultimately, if the newspapers could not actually protect the performers, they did manage to preserve acts that would otherwise be lost in history.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130845083","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial: Theatre and Performance Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum Under Threat","authors":"Jim Davis, J. Norwood, Patricia Smyth, S. Weltman","doi":"10.1177/17483727211008621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211008621","url":null,"abstract":"The largest and most significant archive devoted to the history of British theatre is hosted by the Victoria andAlbertMuseum and is now referred to as the Theatre and Performance collections. Originally known as the Enthoven collection, it was established in 1924 by Gabrielle Enthoven, who had lobbied for such a collection to be established for many years. In 1911 Enthoven proposed in a letter to the Observer:","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134530646","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tribute to Don B. Wilmeth (15 December 1939–7 February 2020)","authors":"Thomas Postlewait","doi":"10.1177/1748372721997396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/1748372721997396","url":null,"abstract":"Don Wilmeth, who specialised in American theatre, drama, and popular entertainment, was a man with a mission. He was educated at the University of Illinois by two of the founding fathers of American theatre history, Richard Moody and Barnard Hewitt. Throughout his career, Wilmeth excelled at compiling bibliographies, checklists, documentary records, glossaries, exhibitions, encyclopedias, guides, theatre histories and anthologies of drama. Editing was Don’s scholarly identity. He established himself as the most accomplished editor of his generation. In his early career, he published a series of bibliographies within a five-year period: (1) The American Stage to World War I: A Guide to Information Sources (Gale Research, 1978); (2) American and English Popular Entertainment: A Guide to Information Sources (Gale Research, 1980); (3) The Language of American Popular Entertainment: A Glossary of Argot, Slang, and Terminology (Greenwood Press, 1981) and (4) Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements: A Reference Guide (Greenwood Press, 1982). In 1980, Wilmeth made a temporary break from editing when he published George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the Stage (Greenwood Press). Yet, editing remained his primary mission. In the same year that he published the actor’s biography, he and Rosemary Cullen co-edited three plays by Augustin Daly, the American playwright, manager and director (Cambridge University Press). This was the first of Don’s many editing partnerships. In 1983, he and Cullen again","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122956026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comedy, Christianity and Melodramatic Affect: The Sorrows of Satan at the Shaftesbury Theatre","authors":"Leanne Waters","doi":"10.1177/17483727211006839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17483727211006839","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Paul M. Berton and Herbert Woodgate’s 1897 melodrama, The Sorrows of Satan, which opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London. The play was adapted from Marie Corelli’s bestselling novel of the same name (1895). In this article, I show how the stage production injected comedy into Corelli’s story, while maintaining and perhaps even amplifying its didactic Christianity. In exploring the techniques of the Berton and Woodgate play, and tracking the production’s critical reception, we can see that late-Victorian religious melodrama was both affectively and visually powerful, as well as capable of considerable nuance.","PeriodicalId":286523,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128839698","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}