Shakespeare and Victorian Women
Shakespeare and Victorian Women
$45.00
USDMuch has been written on the cultural significance of Shakespeare, his influence on particular periods, and his appropriation and subsequent transformation. However, no book until now has specifically addressed the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and Victorian women. In this book, Gail Marshall gives an account of the actresses who played an essential part in redeeming Shakespeare for the Victorian stage, the writers who embraced him as part of the texture of their own writing as well as their personal lives, and those women readers who, educated to be alert to the female voices of Shakespeare, often went on to re-read Shakespeare for their own ends. Dr Marshall argues that women form a fundamental part of the narrative of how the Victorian Shakespeare was made, and that translation, rather than terms such as appropriation or adaptation, is the most appropriate metaphor for understanding the symbiosis between Shakespeare and Victorian women.
- Innovative new work on the importance of Shakespeare and his work in the nineteenth century
- Extends our understanding of the reception of Shakespeare in drama, literature and education contexts
- Sheds new light on educational, intellectual and emotional interests of nineteenth-century women
Reviews & endorsements
Review of the hardback: '… Marshall provides ample reward to the reader as she uncovers fascinating material about Victorian culture and provides intelligent, useful analysis of it. The book is a fitting tribute to those women who made Shakespeare their own.' Literature and History
Review of the hardback: 'Gail Marshall's readable, intense and at times intensive study of the role of Shakespeare in the lives of Victorian women ranges over a wide spectrum of artistic forms from poetry to painting, from the full-blown novel to teenage essay writing … the 'translation' offered in these six chapters gives future interpreters the grounds from which to explore further painted representations, more performances and other female writers such as Anna Jameson and the reviewers and educators who have a shadowy presence in this book along with the 'elusive' Shakespeare himself.' English Studies
Review of the hardback: 'This book represents a fresh study of the impact Shakespeare had on the lives and work of Victorian women.' Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen
Product details
March 2012Paperback
9781107403635
224 pages
229 × 152 × 13 mm
0.34kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Shakespeare and Victorian girls' education
- 2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: translating the language of intimacy
- 3. 'She had made him, as it were, the air she lived in': Shakespeare, Helen Faucit and Fanny Kemble
- 4. George Eliot and Shakespeare: defamiliarising 'second nature'
- 5. Socialism, nationalism and Stratford: Shakespeare and the New Woman at the fin de siècle
- 6. Shakespeare and the actress in the 1890s.
