Women, Performance and the Material of Memory
Description
This book proposes that the performance of archival research is related to the experience of tourism, where an individual immerses herself in a foreign environment, relating to and analyzing visual and sensory materials through embodiment and enactment. Each chapter highlights a particular set of tangible objects including: pocket diaries, portraits, drawings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs in relation to actresses, authors, and artists such as: Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, Marguerite Gardiner the Countess of Blessington, Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Madame Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson. Ultimately, operating as an archival tourist in my analyses, I offer strategies for thinking about the presence of women artists in the archives through methodologies that seek to connect materials from the past with our representations of them in the present.
Reviews / Votes
"The materials of memory provide this book's original and ambitious structural scaffolding. . Engel's sense of wonder at the materials of memory is everywhere apparent, and her eloquent appreciation of their research potential is one of the abiding joys of this book." (Leslie Ritchie, ABO, Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, Vol. 11 (1), 2021)
"This book itself models a practice of scholarship, one that pulls together stories of creative women's lives as they unfold to the scholar in moments of archival discovery, spectatorial surprise, and uncanny reiteration of beaten paths. On that score, Women, Performance and the Material of Memory offers rich reading." (Andrea Zemgulys, Victorian Studies, Vol. 62 (3), 2020)
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Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theater. She is the author of Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (Palgrave Pivot, 2015), Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011), and co-editor with Elaine McGirr of Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830 (2014).