At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was the theatrical center of the United States, owing largely to the elegant Chestnut Street Theatre and its excellent resident company of actors. The survival and success of the company can be greatly attributed to Anne Brunton Merry.Mrs. Merry, who made her first appearance on stage at the ago of sixteen, experienced meteoric success in the English theatre, and after only three years was being favorably compared with te famed Sarah Siddons. She came to the Chestnut Street company in 1796, tow years afer its formation, and through her portrayals of Shakespearean heroines, as well as roles in sentimental comedy and in tragedy, she soon became the most celebrated actress in the American theatre. She established new standards of excellence in her stage portrayals, and during her tenure as manger of the Chestnut Street theatre, she transferred her own high standards to the entire company, demanding a carefully executed theatre operation and advancing the acting profession to a new level of social acceptance. In this sympathetic portrait of an unusual woman, Professor Doty traces Mrs. Merry's career from its beginning at the Bristol theatre in England in 1785 to its tragically early end in 1808. From contemporary newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and diaries, the author has fashioned a fascinating story of a great actress and her contribution to the development of American repertory theatre during this vital period.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Philadelphia was the theatrical center of the United States, owing largely to the elegant Chestnut Street Theatre and its excellent resident company of actors. The survival and success of the company can be greatly attributed to Anne Brunton Merry.Mrs. Merry, who made her first appearance on stage at the ago of sixteen, experienced meteoric success in the English theatre, and after only three years was being favorably compared with te famed Sarah Siddons. She came to the Chestnut Street company in 1796, tow years afer its formation, and through her portrayals of Shakespearean heroines, as well as roles in sentimental comedy and in tragedy, she soon became the most celebrated actress in the American theatre. She established new standards of excellence in her stage portrayals, and during her tenure as manger of the Chestnut Street theatre, she transferred her own high standards to the entire company, demanding a carefully executed theatre operation and advancing the acting profession to a new level of social acceptance. In this sympathetic portrait of an unusual woman, Professor Doty traces Mrs. Merry's career from its beginning at the Bristol theatre in England in 1785 to its tragically early end in 1808. From contemporary newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and diaries, the author has fashioned a fascinating story of a great actress and her contribution to the development of American repertory theatre during this vital period.

This series of bibliographical references is one of the most important tools for research in modern and contemporary French literature. No other bibliography represents the scholarly activities and publications of these fields as completely.

French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.

"The Shaping of Text pays homage to the work of the late John Porter Houston, who wrote extensively on style, rhetoric, and narrative and poetic techniques in Western European literature. It is appropriate that the essays in this volume focus on the form of the literary work and the ways in which form determines meaning." "William Calin's essay on the saint's life analyzes the use of antithesis as a poetic and structural device that illustrates the saint's fundamental understanding of the relationship between the ephemeral reality of his physical existence and the absolute, timeless reality to which he aspires. Raymond LaCharite's study of Rabelais focuses on the author's self-conscious awareness of this relationship and of Renaissance preoccupation with reading as both an act of creation and interpretation. George Joseph's study of three Renaissance poets focuses on the use of paradox as both a figure of speech and as a genre that serves both as a structure and as a basis for the interaction in the poetry. David Rubin's essay on La Fontaine emphasizes the ways in which the register of style in the Fables is used to set the tone and control the meaning of the language." "In the chapters devoted to nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature one can see the continuing closer relationship between the book as a work of art and the reality in which it interacts. Suzanne Nash analyzes the strategy Mme. de Stael uses in writing De l'Allemagne, a book written less to present an accurate portrayal of Germany than to promote her own republican ideals for France. Ross Chambers's essay probes the question of the theme of melancholy in Romantic writing and its relationship to the social and political structures of the period; Edward Kaplan shows how a growing ethical, social concern can be seen in Baudelaire's revised Les Fleurs du Mal; Rima Reck and Edward Kaplan reflect the growing use of literature as a vehicle for influencing public opinion." "Stirling Haig analyzes Flaubert's careful use of style and his awareness that reality is ultimately shaped by the beholder's perspective. Finnally, Virginia La Charite's chapter on Proust returns to the idea of a structure within a structure, in this case the architecture of the cathedral as a metaphor of synthesis, an aesthetic device that gives an intelligible structure to Proust's enormous but intricately complex, mass of details." "If John Porter Houston focused on form and style, it is because he understood the semiotic nature of all things: that a writer's style is a subtle form of refined communication or, as Houston wrote, "style is an absolute manner of seeing things for Proust, a question of vision, and so constitutes the ultimate reality of literature.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Reading a text is an ethical activity for Emmanuel Levinas. His moral philosophy considers written texts to be natural places to discover relations of responsibility in Western philosophical systems which are marked by extreme violence and totalizing hatred. While ethics is understood to mean a relationship with the other and reading is the appropriation of the other to the self, readings according to Levinas naturally entail relationships with the other. Levinas's own writings are often frought with the struggle between his own maleness, the concerns of feminism, and the Judaism that marks his contributions to the debates of the Talmud. This book uses male feminism as its perspective in presenting the applications of Levinas's ethical vision to texts whose readings have presented moral dilemmas for women readers. Levinas's philosophical theories can provide keys to unlock the difficulties of these texts whose readings will provide models of reading as ethical acts beginning with the ethical contract in Song of Songs where the assumption of a woman writer begins the elaboration of issues that sets a male reader as her other. From the reader's vantage point of seeing the self as other, other issues of male feminism become increasingly poignant, ranging from the solicitude of listening to Céline (Chapter 2), the responsibility for noise in Nizan (Chapter 3), the asymmetrical pattern of face-to-face relationships in Maupassant (Chapter 4), the sovereignty of laughter in Bataille and Zola (Chapter 5), the call of the other in Italo Svevo (Chapter 6), the Woman as Other in Breton (Chapter 7), the ethical self in Drieu la Rochelle (Chapter 8), the response to Hannah Arendt (Chapter 9), and the vulnerability of Bernard-Henri Lévy (Chapter 10). The male feminist reader is thus the incarnation of the struggle at the core of the issues outlined by Levinas for the act of reading as an ethical endeavor.