evisioning the English Gothic Melodrama
| Autor: | Kuo, Chen-ling, 郭貞伶 |
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| Druh dokumentu: | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Popis: | 85 Revisioning the English Gothic Melodrama Abstract In this thesis, I examine how the gothic melodrama can help us understandthe interaction between the British theatre and its audiences in the early nineteenthcentury. First I discuss how deeply the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuryBritish society was influenced by the industrial revolution. I especially focus on howartisans felt this change and impact of the industrial revolution. The industrial revolutionchanged the artisans' social position since the technological inventions replaced the artisans' crafts. I further examine how the artisan audiences were active spectators in the theatres,as is clearly manifeted in their participation in the Old Price Riots at the CoventGarden Theatre in 1809. In the first chapter, I examine one of the most popular gothic melodrama in theearly nineteenth century, Charles Robert Maturin's Bertram; or, the Castle of St. Aldobrand,which went through twenty-two consecutive nights performances in 1816, to explore how thisgothic melodrama exemplifies the relationship between the theatre and its audiences.The fictive representations of the past in the gothic melodrama created a sense of historicitythat enabled the audience to perceived the difference between past and present. In the second chapter, I explore a similar fictive representations of the past that transcends theboundaries between the past and the present by focusing on Joanna Baillie's Orra,a play written in the 1790s. In Orra, Baillie seems in a strategic way to empower her femaleprotagonist through the pesudo-historical (fictive) language. Throughout my thesis, I employ Hans Robert Jauss' concept of the hosizonof understanding and perception that can be changing and mutable, ot fixed and unalterable,to explore how the gothic melodrama opens the audiences' horizon of understanding. By retaining a critical distance between the stage and the audiences withthe representations of the past in the gothic melodrama, the horizon of interpretationof the gothic melodrama leaves unanswered questions on the capacity of and possibilityfor the individual to interpret the past. The most significant element in the gothic melodrama I explore is themanifestation of the fictive in opening the horizon of interpretation, which createsthe possibility for the artisan audiences to perceive a communication between the past andthe present. With the capacity to question representations of reality, the spectators' horizon of understanding opens up to allow them to produce their own meaning.The fictive in the gothic melodrama empowers the spectatos to be active and potential interpreters of the past by retaining a critical awareness and by questioning the laws of reality in the play. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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