Woodslane | Book - 9780252082221

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Elocutionists:

Women, Music, and the Spoken Word

ISBN-13: 9780252082221
Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Imprint: UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
By Marian Wilson Kimber
Price: AUD $60.99
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Availability: This book is temporarily out of stock, order will be despatched as soon as fresh stock is received.
Local release date: 13/02/2017
Format: Paperback (100.00mm X 100.00mm) 352 pages Weight: 560g
Categories: Music [AV]

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Google Preview: Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre - dominated by women - achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century.

Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music.; "In her fascinating and long-needed study, Wilson Kimber reconstitutes and interprets a set of pervasive but neglected practices that include not only elocution but also melodramatic performance, recitation in combination with music, and the activities of the verse speaking choir. In so doing, she helps to recover an elusive but crucial element of cultural history: the sound of women's lives."--Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America

"A century ago, popular literature reached many Americans through the interpretive voices of women, women who--typically barred from the men's world of political oratory--cultivated a performance art in the home, the theater, on the traveling circuit. While revealing the huge variety of music used to accompany spoken narration, Wilson Kimber brings alive again the forgotten art of elocution through a close examination of the 'sentimental keepsakes' and pedagogical traditions it sought to preserve."--Michael V. Pisani, Vassar College; Google Preview content

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Elocutionists:

Women, Music, and the Spoken Word