Library Catalog
Amazon cover image
Image from Amazon.com

A Monster with a Thousand Hands : The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England / Amy J. Rodgers.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018]Copyright date: ©2019Description: 1 online resource (240 p.) : 2 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812295207
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 792.0942/09031 23
LOC classification:
  • PR658.A88 R63 2018
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries -- Chapter 1. Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship -- Chapter 2. The Blood of the Muses: Violent Spectatorship and Authorial Response in The Knight of the Burning Pestle -- Chapter 3. The Book of Praises: The Spectator as Reader in Shakespeare’s Romances -- Chapter 4. The Language of Looking: Making Senses Speak in Jonsonian Masque -- Epilogue. The Discursive Spectator and the Question of History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation.While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the "effects" of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction. Discursive Iterations/Fearful Symmetries -- Chapter 1. Toward a Theory of Discursive Spectatorship -- Chapter 2. The Blood of the Muses: Violent Spectatorship and Authorial Response in The Knight of the Burning Pestle -- Chapter 3. The Book of Praises: The Spectator as Reader in Shakespeare’s Romances -- Chapter 4. The Language of Looking: Making Senses Speak in Jonsonian Masque -- Epilogue. The Discursive Spectator and the Question of History -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

A Monster with a Thousand Hands makes visible a figure that has been largely overlooked in early modern scholarship on theater and audiences: the discursive spectator, an entity distinct from the actual bodies attending early modern English playhouses. Amy J. Rodgers demonstrates how the English commercial theater's rapid development and prosperity altered the lexicon for describing theatergoers and the processes of engagement that the theater was believed to cultivate. In turn, these changes influenced and produced a cultural projection—the spectator—a figure generated by social practices rather than a faithful recording of those who attended the theater. The early modern discursive spectator did not merely develop alongside the phenomenological one, but played as significant a role in shaping early modern viewers and viewing practices as did changes to staging technologies, exhibition practices, and generic experimentation.While audience and film studies have theorized the spectator, these fields tend to focus on the role of twentieth-century media (film, television, and the computer) in producing mass-culture viewers. Such emphases lead to a misapprehension that the discursive spectator is modernity's creature. Fearing anachronism, early modern scholars have preferred demographic studies of audiences to theoretical engagements with the "effects" of spectatorship. While demographic work provides an invaluable snapshot, it cannot account for the ways that the spectator is as much an idea as a material presence. And, while a few studies pursue the dynamics that existed among author, text, and audience using critical tools sharpened by film studies, they tend to obscure how early modern culture understood the spectator. Rather than relying exclusively on historical or theoretical methodologies, A Monster with a Thousand Hands reframes spectatorship as a subject of inquiry shaped both by changes in entertainment technologies and the interaction of groups and individuals with different forms of cultural production.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Jun 2024)