Playing Sick (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | Meredith Conti | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness, and the cultural construct of illness was an indisputable staple on the late-nineteenth-century stage.

Playing Sick analyzes those popular performances to determine how they confirmed or counteracted salient medical, cultural, and individualized expressions of illness. Meredith Conti uses characters from Camille to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Jekyll to explore representations of consumption, drug addiction and mental disorders to suggest a lexicon of performed illness and contagious diseases. Each of these types of performance is associated with specific identity categories - contagion with nationality, addiction with class, and mental illness with gender roles - to identify the ways in which the theatre of this period helped to balance the authority of medical science by helping to re-centralize the connections between the individual and their illness.