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"Masquerades in literature."
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Masquerade and social justice in contemporary Latin American fiction
\"Contemporary Latin American fiction establishes a unique connection between masquerade, frequently motivated by stigma or trauma, and social justice. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines philosophy, history, psychology, literature, and social justice theory, this study delineates the synergistic connection between these two themes. Weldt-Basson examines fourteen novels by twelve different Latin American authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Sergio Galindo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Fernando del Paso, Mayra Santos-Febres, Isabel Allende, Carmen Boullosa, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Marcela Serrano, Sara Sefchovich, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ariel Dorfman. She elucidates the varieties of social justice operating in the plots of contemporary Latin American novels: distributive, postmodern/feminist, postcolonial, transitional, and historical justices. The author further examines how masquerade and disguise aid in articulating the theme of social justice, why this is important, and how it relates to Latin American history and the historical novel. \"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Modernist Masquerade
Masked and costume balls thrived in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during a period of rich literary and theatrical experimentation. The first study of its kind,
The Modernist Masquerade examines the cultural history of masquerades in Russia and their representations in influential literary works. The masquerade's widespread appearance as a literary motif in works by such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Leonid Andreev, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Fyodor Sologub mirrored its popularity as a leisure-time activity and illuminated its integral role in the Russian modernist creative consciousness. Colleen McQuillen charts how the political, cultural, and personal significance of lavish costumes and other forms of self-stylizing evolved in Russia over time. She shows how their representations in literature engaged in dialog with the diverse aesthetic trends of Decadence, Symbolism, and Futurism and with the era's artistic philosophies.
eBook
The masqueraders, or, Fatal curiosity ; and, The surprize, or, Constancy rewarded
The most important female English novelist of the 1720s, Eliza Haywood is famous for writing scandalous fiction about London society. Fast-moving, controversial, and sometimes disturbing, Haywood’s short novels The Masqueraders and The Surprize are valuable sources for the study of eighteenth-century gender and identity, the social history of masquerade, the dangers of courtship and seduction, and conceptions of elite and popular cultures.
Despite their common theme of masquerade and seduction, the two short novels are a study in contrasts. The Masqueraders features the whirl of London life, with a libertine anti-hero and his serial seductions of women who believe that they can manipulate the social conventions that are expected to limit them. The Surprize , on the other hand, is an uncharacteristically sentimental story in which a similarly salacious plot ends in rewards for the good and virtuous.
Well suited to the teaching of these two texts, this volume contains annotated scholarly editions of both novels, an extensive introduction, and useful appendices that discuss the masquerade’s role in eighteenth-century debates on gender, morality, and identity.
eBook
'Amari-Akaghi'—The Knowledge of the Unknown: Women and Masquerade in Achebe's Things Fall Apart
The phrase \"amari-akaghi\" in my Akpoha, Igbo village, is tied around the metaphor of women and masking culture in Igbo society. This phrase alludes to women's knowledge of the workings of masquerades yet they cannot talk about it openly. I have weaved this paper around the perception of the \"knowledge of the unknown\" as touted and exemplified by Okonkwo's wives in Achebe's Things Fall Apart . Achebe in his seminal work revealed the position of the egwugwu masquerade tradition vis-à-vis women in Umuofia. Literatures on masquerade and women also suggest that women know much about the inner workings and secrecy associated with masquerade but cannot openly discuss it. However, no known effort has been dedicated to investigating this phenomenon in Achebe's Things Fall Apart against the reality of the concept of \"amari-akaghi\" in Akpoha, Igbo village. This paper, therefore, subjects Things Fall Apart to textual analyses through deconstruction of the narration. I conclude with valid interrogation of works, including the primary resource of this paper, that women in many Igbo villages of old and those represented in Achebe's Umuofia have always known and thought about the inscrutability of masquerades but have constantly kept to themselves to avoid upsetting the peace of their society and attracting ugly repercussions. This knowledge of the unknown exhibited by women in both societies, as investigated in this essay, had ensured cordial shared gender roles, which guaranteed peaceful coexistence in Igbo society.
Journal Article
His book, her play: Kate Mulvany's adaptations of 'Masquerade' and 'Jasper Jones'
When asked by Melbourne Theatre Company about the changes made in her adaptation of Craig Silvey's novel Jasper Jones (2009), Mulvany noted that although it is 'his book on stage … it's also important ultimately for it to be a Kate Mulvany play'. This is important when analysing Jasper Jones and also Mulvany's adaptation of the picturebook Masquerade (1979) by Kit Williams. Mulvany, a significant figure in contemporary Australian theatre for her work as an actor and a playwright, has been lauded for possessing a 'remark- able' quality, which is 'deliciously unpredictable and courageous', and 'totally inhabited and transforming'. Mulvany has seen global recognition for her acting, and as a writer, with her adaptation of Medea - co-written with Anne-Louise Sarks - being staged in Auckland, Dublin and London. Her other plays have remained in Australia, typically having short seasons and occasional revivals. Although I credit Mulvany as an adaptor − as she has written five successful adapted works − Mulvany sees herself simply as a playwright. She notes, 'I don't adapt. I write. I'm a playwright … And if it's an adaptation of a play or a book or a film, it's usually an adaptation of an event … taking a real-life event and adapting that.' I argue it is crucial Mulvany be seen as an adaptor, as her style of adapting material including autobiographical material is unique and enhances the story that she's adapting. In both Masquerade (2015) and Jasper Jones (2016), previously written material and previously lived experiences are utilised in adaptation.
Journal Article
‘I should like to see a woman smoking while she was nursing her baby’: The New Woman, Crossdressing, and Humour in Horace William Bleackley’s Une Culotte (1894)
While the New Woman was often mocked and caricatured as a mannish and destructive figure in the late Victorian press, New Woman writers also used humour to attack the status quo and parry ridicule with ridicule. A case in point is the non-canonical New Woman novel, Une Culotte; or a New Woman, An Impossible Story of Modern Oxford (1894), by Horace William Bleackley. This essay explores the fundamental contradictions of humour in Une Culotte by looking at how Bleackley situates his New Women heroines within the context of nineteenth-century British feminism. First I suggest that humour is generated in the novel by the New Woman protagonist’s comic attacks of the rigid construction of gender differences. Then I examine how as a male New Woman writer Bleackley successfully uses female cross-dressing to humorous effect in order to empower the New Woman with opportunities that extend beyond the parameters of home. Bleackley incorporates comic mockery to expose the gender pretensions of the period and ultimately celebrates the New Woman’s control of their bodies. In Une Culotte, the New Women fight back against the mockery of the deeply-rooted culture of contempt for progressive women whilst revealing the comic dimension of cross-dressing and its threat to a dichotomous culture of gender and sexuality.
Journal Article
SPATIAL RECONFIGURATIONS OF POWER: FROM SHAKESPEARE’S THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR TO VERDI’S FALSTAFF STAGED BY THE METROPOLITAN OPERA, NEW YORK (2013)
This article focuses on the peculiar setting – the kitchen – chosen for the revenge scene in Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff (Act II, scene 2) by director Robert Carsen for his production at the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2013). I examine side by side Arrigo Boito’s libretto and the corresponding scenes in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor in order to highlight the textual clues that may support Carsen’s choice. Against the background provided by a brief historicisation of the emergence of the modern kitchen and its association (originally) with bourgeois women, I discuss Carsen’s revenge scene, by recourse to gender theory, as a masquerade of femininity, i.e., a mockingly exaggerated performance of gender.
Journal Article
Samāǧa performances in third/ninth-century Abbasid courts
Literary sources from the Abbasid period record few descriptions of courtly masquerades and plays called samāǧa, which closely resemble sumozhe plays from eighth-century China. On the basis of these samāǧa descriptions, the present paper argues that it is possible to understand how samāǧa plays were carried out. Moreover, I argue that samāǧa performances were a Central Asian custom imported to the Abbasid court with the establishment of the Turkish corps, and that its disappearance after the caliphate of al-Muʿtaḍid signals a substantial shift in the nature of the Turkish presence in the Abbasid heartland, marked by the establishment of the mamlūk system.
Journal Article
Performing Womanhood: Fictions of Love in Louisa May Alcott’s Behind a Mask
This article discusses Louisa May Alcott’s novella Behind a Mask in the light of Melville’s last novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), arguing that, behind the mask of a sentimental novel that appears to conform to stereotypes, Alcott depicts a true-to-life heroine and shows how fiction can actually uncover the truth of life, how the many parts we play obfuscate our deeper nature and how a woman’s life in particular is nothing but a continuous performance on the social stage. In Behind a Mask, Alcott subtly reinstates “a woman’s power” (its subtitle) over and against a male-dominated novel and a male-dominated society.
Journal Article