A fresh and provocative approach to representations of exotic women in Victorian Britain.

Female characters assumed increasing prominence in the narratives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century opera. And for contemporary audiences, many of these characters--and the celebrated women who played them--still define opera at its finest and most searingly affective, even if storylines leave them swooning and faded by the end of the drama. The presence and representation of women in opera has been addressed in a range of recent studies that offer valuable insights into the operatic stage as cultural space, focusing a critical lens at the text and the position and signification of female characters. Moving that lens onto the historical, The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century sheds light on the singers who created and inhabited these roles, the flesh-and-blood women who embodied these fabled "doomed women" onstage before an audience. Editors Rachel Cowgill and Hilary Poriss lead a cast of renowned contributors in an impressive display of current approaches to the lives, careers, and performances of female opera singers. Essential theoretical perspectives reflect several broad themes woven through the volume-cultures of celebrity surrounding the female singer; the emergence of the quasi-mythical figure of the diva; explorations of the intricate and sundry arts associated with the prima donna, and with her representation in other media; and the diversity and complexity of contemporary responses to her. The prima donna influenced compositional practices, determined musical and dramatic interpretation, and affected management decisions about the running of the opera house, content of the season, and employment of other artists--a clear demonstration that her position as "first woman" extended well beyond the boards of the operatic stage itself. The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century is an important addition to the collections of students and researchers in opera studies, nineteenth-century music, performance and gender/sexuality studies, and cultural studies, as well as to the shelves of opera singers and enthusiasts.

A fresh look at how literary and visual portraiture in the Romantic era embodied a newly commercial culture

Mobility and Corporeality in 19th and 21st Century Anglophone Literature: Bodies in Motion aims at exploring the intersection of literary, mobility and body studies in Anglophone literature from the 19th century to the 21st century. Corporeal mobility includes a variety of mobile bodies that have long been othered and marginalised due to issues pertaining to gender, disability, race, and class. Yet there is a relative lack of academic work on it, despite the fact that Anglophone literature has increasingly portrayed the circulation of characters, objects, and information since the 19th century, echoing the many types of mobility that have occurred through processes of colonisation, decolonisation and globalisation. This book, therefore, discusses the ways in which literatures produced in the English-speaking world challenge normative depictions of bodies on the move and reconceptualise them by making corporeality an essential feature of movement across the world.

This companion to Victorian popular fiction includes more than 300 cross-referenced entries on works written for the British mass market. Biographical sketches cover the writers and their publishers, the topics that concerned them and the genres they helped to establish or refine. Entries introduce readers to long-overlooked authors who were widely read in their time, with suggestions for further reading and emerging resources for the study of popular fiction.

A pathbreaking "gastrocritical" approach to the poetics of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and their contemporaries

Author, translator, social critic and Harvard professor of art, Charles Eliot Norton was widely regarded in his own day as the most cultivated man in America. In modern times, by contrast, he has been condemned as the supercilious representative of an embattled patrician caste. This revisionary study argues that Norton’s genuine significance for American culture and politics today can only be grasped by recovering the vanished contexts in which his life and work took shape. In a wide-ranging analysis, Linda Dowling demonstrates the effects upon Norton’s thought of the great transatlantic humanitarian reform movement of the 1840s, the Pre-Raphaelite and Ruskinian revolution in art and architecture of the 1850s and the surging liberal optimism that emerged from the Civil War. Drawing on numerous deleted passages from Norton’s manuscript journals, Dowling probes beneath the imperturbable mask of the public Norton, bringing to light the elusive private man. Returning from Europe in 1873, bereft of his wife and stripped of his religious belief, Norton was compelled to confront the painful contradictions within his own liberal political faith. In a land given to celebrating freedom of speech, Norton would become a speaker subjected to physical threats for opposing the Spanish-American War. Among a people given to glorying in its superiority to other civilizations, he would become a social critic reviled for arguing that the nation was failing to live up to its own most cherished ideals. It would be Norton’s misfortune, shared with others of his generation, to watch the golden promise of a victorious war for the Union fade into the unrepentant cynicism of the Gilded Age. Yet Norton’s militant idealism and heroic citizenship, Dowling argues, survive now as a vital parable for American civic liberalism in the present day.