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Methodologically connecting at its core the experience-based and interpretation-based aesthetic approach to popular culture/popular art(s) on one hand and the basis-building views of what is called arch-textual thematology on the other, the paper seeks to examine, following its particular embodiment, one of the most stable, recurring and probably therefore one of the most iconic stock characters - the “tortured artist” stock character. This example of a “stereotyped character easily recognized by readers or audiences from recurrent appearances in literary or folk tradition” (Baldick, 2008, p. 317) can be - besides other principal and distinctive examples such as the “mad scientist”, the “lady/damsel in distress” or, let’s say, the “everyman” - witnessed all across culture, including the sub-sphere of popular culture, and the arts. The implied cultural significance and “omnipresence” of the “tortured artist” stock character can be aptly illustrated by Vincent Van Gogh and not only as a real-life tortured artist prototype or even archetype but also as a popular model for numerous and various cultural depictions - from poems by Charles Bukowski through the “moving pictures” of Loving Vincent to an episode of the well-recognized British TV show Doctor Who.

During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined. The research for this article has been funded by the projects FFI2017-86417-P and GIUV 2017-354.

There is no established classification scheme for literary characters in narrative theory short of generic categories like protagonist vs. antagonist or round vs. flat. This is so despite the ubiquity of stock characters that recur across media, cultures, and historical time periods. We present here a proposal of a systematic psychological scheme for classifying characters from the literary and dramatic fields based on a modification of the Thomas-Kilmann (TK) Conflict Mode Instrument used in applied studies of personality. The TK scheme classifies personality along the two orthogonal dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. To examine the validity of a modified version of this scheme, we had 142 participants provide personality ratings for 40 characters using two of the Big Five personality traits as well as assertiveness and cooperativeness from the TK scheme. The results showed that assertiveness and cooperativeness were orthogonal dimensions, thereby supporting the validity of using a modified version of TK’s two-dimensional scheme for classifying characters.

This article in comics form looks at an under-investigated phenomenon of nun characters appearing in contemporary comics as a unified trope. Appearing with a strong degree of uniformity, these stock characters share a unique costume, weaponry, repeated storylines, and most importantly, are couched in medievalism. To explain the development of these characteristics, which can seem wholly contemporary, the comic looks back at the textual and visual representation of nun and religious female characters —such as saints— from their early medieval origins, through their visual recodification in the Victorian era, up to applications of the nun character in the twentieth century. Examining this issue from different perspectives, this article argues that despite the presence of nuns in the contemporary world, the stock character in comics is dependent on some degree of medievalization, and maps these characteristics as they evolved over time, finding that, thanks to the medievalization itself, nun stock characters present a unique model of superheroine in comics.

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RESUMO Este artigo é oriundo da pesquisa resultante na tese de doutorado Antônio José da Silva: uma dramaturgia de convenções1. No presente texto, discute-se o princípio de carnavalização no teatro ibérico a partir de diferentes perspectivas teóricas, dentre as quais a de Mikhail Bakhtin. Nesse sentido, a partir da descrição da personagem-tipo do gracioso, o criado carnavalizado originalmente inserido no teatro pelos autores do Século de Ouro espanhol, pretende-se problematizar embates de classe e artifícios discursivos da narrativa tragicômica. Tal análise é embasada pela teoria de análise de textos barrocos ibéricos desenvolvidas em Espanha, nos estertores do século XX e no início do XXI, especialmente em Hermenegildo (1995). Desse modo, analisa-se como a personagem-tipo, seja em sua formulação tradicional masculina ou na feminina, como criada, participa das intrigas, de modo a tornar mais contundentes as questões centrais do enredo disparador. Como exemplificação da teoria trabalhada, trazemos a obra do autor português setecentista Antônio José da Silva, Precipício de Faetonte. Nela, é possível perceber a participação dessas personagens baixas entremeando a intriga principal: o que pode ser lido, em nossa perspectiva, como uma forma de carnavalização do teatro ibérico de tal período, dentro da perspectiva bakhtiniana. ABSTRACT This article derives from the research which resulted in the doctoral thesis Antonio Jose da Silva: a dramaturgy made of conventions.1 It discusses the principle of carnivalization in Iberian theatre from different theoretical perspectives, including that of Mikhail Bakhtin. Through an analysis of the stock character of the gracioso, the carnivalized servant figure originally introduced by the dramatists of the Spanish Golden Age, the intention is to problematize the class tensions and discursive artifices of the tragicomic narrative. This analysis is based on the theory for studying Iberian baroque texts developed in Spain at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and which is particularly present in Hermenegildo (1995). This article therefore examines the ways in which this stock character, either in its traditional male version or as its female counterpart - the maid -, participates in the development of dramatic intrigue, amplifying the impact of the central issues of a given play’s main plot. To demonstrate the aforementioned theory, this article will examine the play Precipício de Faetonte by 18th-century Portuguese playwright Antonio José da Silva. In this work the actions of these low-status characters can be seen to be interwoven with the development of the central intrigue, a fact which, from a Bakhtinian perspective, can be interpreted as a form of carnivalization explored by the Iberian theatre of the period.

In this chapter, several stock characters (i.e., musical roles) are outlined in which students may flexibly and creatively engage with a variety of musical acts, referred to as scenarios, in the author’s conception of an SGM class. These scenarios may be acted out by the players (i.e., students) simultaneously, such that at any given time, any number of scenarios is being played out in the classroom by several small troupes of “players.” Rather than having all students practice performing the same character (e.g., the role of an ensemble musician) on a single center stage, LCP in an SGM setting will see many stagings of creative work driven by the goals of individuals and small troupes of students, performed in “stations” or “clusters” within a single classroom. The staging and blocking of the classroom will assist the facilitator in providing stock characters’ autonomy, but with enough structure so that a positive learning climate and meaningful scenarios can develop.

In his preface to Almayer’s Folly, written soon after the novel’s completion Conrad takes issue with Alice Meynell’s recent article on “decivilisation.” “I am content to sympathise with common mortals” he writes, “no matter where they live; in houses or in huts, in streets under a fog or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea” (Conrad, Almayer’s Folly 3). At first reading, Conrad seems to peddle the very same prejudices he critiques in Alice Meynell: Jim-Eng, the Chinese opium wreck; Taminah, the impassive oriental woman inured against pain; Almayer himself, the Indo-European ruined by his own fantasies of fortune and unable ever to return to the European world he reveres. Each are stock characters amongst many more in the novel playing a part little different from those given to them by the popular authors whose works Meynell dismisses. What distinguishes them is the narrative context into which they are put, whose machinations throw into relief the instability of the rule of law and of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism. Conrad’s time in South East Asia was one of particular political and legal transformation for Borneo, the repercussions of which Conrad translates directly into Almayer’s Folly. My argument is that his sympathies with the colonized are expressed less through individual characters but rather through the complexities, frustrations and indeterminacies that arise out of the colonial enterprise. A key concern for Conrad, therefore, is the problem of justice in an international setting. As I argue, long before the publication of “Geography and Some Explorers,” Conrad’s fiction was already illuminating the inconsistencies that emerge in the process of putting (international and transnational) law into practice in the indeterminate spaces of colonial geography.

This essay uses an exploration of the history of the nebbish, one of Yiddish literature’s most enduring comic stock characters, to discuss how and why this stereotype has evolved, and even been reclaimed, in contemporary popular culture. The nebbish is an interesting case study because it began as a negative, often anti-Semitic stereotype and evolved into an Everyman character with whom the audience can, and even wants to, identify. Furthermore, the contemporary nebbish is complicated by two shifts in the depiction of the character. First, nebbishness has moved from being an explicitly Jewish characteristic to a general attribute that anyone can possess. Second, all the Yiddish stock types started out as male characters, but most of them have been able to encompass women in their contemporary manifestations. The nebbish, however, has remained almost exclusively male. Women who are treated in a nebbish-like way become tragic figures, not comic relief. This essay briefly investigates some examples o...

This article delves into the lives and careers of two significant Russian singers: the bass Osip Petrov and his wife, the mezzo-soprano Anna Vorobyova, who created or inspired leading roles in operas by Glinka, Dargomïzhsky and Musorgsky. Over the course of a career that spanned some four decades, Petrov would become the most celebrated Russian bass of the nineteenth century; Vorobyova, whose career was cut short by a tragic accident, would turn her attention to the private sphere and incubate a younger generation of musicians. Drawing on reviews, memoirs and personal correspondence, I chart the influence of this couple not only on individual composers and operas, but also on the development of stock characters such as the father, the buffoon, the antihero and the trouser role.

In his pioneering study of Grande Dame Guignol (also referred to as hag horror or psycho-biddy), a female-centric 1960s subgenre of horror film, Peter Shelley explains that the grande dame, a stock character in this form of cinematic expression, “may pine for a lost youth and glory, or she may be trapped by idealized memories of childhood, with a trauma that haunts her past” (8). Indeed, a typical Grande Dame Guignol female protagonist/antagonist (as these two roles often merge) usually deals with various kinds of traumatic experiences: loss of a child, domestic violence, childhood abuse, family conflicts or sudden end of career in the fickle artistic industry, etc. Unable to cope with her problems, but also incapable of facing the inevitable process of aging and dying, she gradually yields to mental and physical illnesses that further strengthen the trauma and lead to her social exclusion, making her life even more unbearable. Unsurprisingly, scholars such as Charles Derry choose to name psycho-biddies horrors of personality, drawing attention to the insightful psychological portrayal of their characters. Thus, it would be relevant and illuminating to discuss films such as Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) as narratives of trauma. This will be the main concern of my article.

With particular reference to Rose Tremain’s Orange fiction prize-winning novel The Road Home, Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans, John Lanchester’s Capital and others, this chapter looks at the depiction of Eastern European migrants in contemporary British fiction. Even though these novels offer more varied representations than those from the Cold War period—the communist spy becomes here a hardworking migrant—this chapter shows that the New European migrant is still a stock character in these works: they are builders, fruit pickers, nannies, and waitresses. He/she usually speaks in broken English and is primarily focused on making money in the West—indeed, his/her aspirations rarely extend beyond this. Finally, it critically examines the portrayal of Eastern Europeans as either highly sexualized or masculinized characters.

The present article puts the genre of the sentimental Spanish comedy of the eighteenth century under closer scrutiny, a genre with a moral as well as educational remit. The portrayal of the merchant and entrepreneur on stage as paternalistic characters, attributed with fulfilling an exemplary role mindful of their responsibility towards society, are the subject of this analysis. Both stock characters serve the purpose to bring into the awareness of a predominantly bourgeois audience, to what extent economically profitable – and at the same time socially responsible – actions within one’s own microcosm can exert a positive influence on the macrocosm of the entire Spanish nation. Over the course of the theatrical, enlightened reform discourse, the sentimental comedy strikes a balance between the mutual feeling of friendship and economic ratio. Concisely, this feeling is just another form of patriotism, conceived by Spanish eighteenth century economists, e.g. Francisco de Cabarrus, as a strong bond among the members of the Spanish society. While taking a closer look at the sentimental comedies El hombre agradecido (1796) by Luciano Comella and La industriosa madrilena y El fabricante de Olot (1789) by Francisco Duran, this paper aims to illustrate the significance of both the honorary merchant as well as the benevolent entrepreneur by taking into account the following aspects: the crucial importance of the time lag for the trade industry of the eighteenth century; the role of transatlantic trade chains as an upcoming form of ‘social network’; the correlation between economically moderate and socially responsible actions; and, last but not least, the portrayal of a sound work ethos as a new virtue of the flourishing bourgeoisie.