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The Battle of Bunkers-Hill (Hugh Henry Brackenridge); The Contrast (Royall Tyler); Andre (William Dunlap); Superstition (James Nelson Barker); The Octoroon (Dion Doucicault); and Shore Acres (James A Herne).
In this survey of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American drama, Tice L. Miller examines American plays written before a canon was established in American dramatic literature and provides analyses central to the culture that produced them. Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries evaluates plays in the early years of the republic, reveals shifts in taste from the classical to the contemporary in the 1840s and 1850s, and considers the increasing influence of realism at the end of the nineteenth century. Miller explores the relationship between American drama and societal issues during this period. While never completely shedding its English roots, says Miller, the American drama addressed issues important on this side of the Atlantic such as egalitarianism, republicanism, immigration, slavery, the West, Wall Street, and the Civil War. In considering the theme of egalitarianism, the volume notes Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation in 1831 that equality was more important to Americans than liberty. Also addressed is the Yankee character, which became a staple in American comedy for much of the nineteenth century. Miller analyzes several English plays and notes how David Garrick’s reforms in London were carried over to the colonies. Garrick faced an increasingly middle-class public, offers Miller, and had to make adjustments to plays and to his repertory to draw an audience. The volumealso looks at the shift in drama that paralleled the one in political power from the aristocrats who founded the nation to Jacksonian democrats. Miller traces how the proliferation of newspapers developed a demand for plays that reflected contemporary society and details how playwrights scrambled to put those symbols of the outside world on stage to appeal to the public. Steamships and trains, slavery and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and French influences are presented as popular subjects during that time. Entertaining the Nation effectively outlines the civilizing force of drama in the establishment and development of the nation, ameliorating differences among the various theatergoing classes, and provides a microcosm of the changes on and off the stage in America during these two centuries.
Presenting an innovative approach to performance studies and literary history, Soyica Colbert argues for the centrality of black performance traditions to African American literature, including preaching, dancing, blues and gospel, and theatre itself, showing how these performance traditions create the 'performative ground' of African American literary texts. Across a century of literary production using the physical space of the theatre and the discursive space of the page, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, August Wilson and others deploy performances to re-situate black people in time and space. The study examines African American plays past and present, including A Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, demonstrating how African American dramatists stage black performances in their plays as acts of recuperation and restoration, creating sites that have the potential to repair the damage caused by slavery and its aftermath.
This volume provides an accessible and engaging guide to the study of American dramatic literature. Designed to support students in reading, discussing, and writing about commonly assigned American plays, this text offers timely resources to think critically and originally about key moments on the American stage. Combining comprehensive coverage of the core plays from the post-Revolutionary era to the present, each chapter includes: historical and cultural context of each of the plays and their distinctive literary features clear introductions to the ongoing critical debates they have provoked collaborative prompts for classroom or online discussion annotated bibliographies for further research With its accessible prose style and clear structure, this introduction spotlights specific plays while encouraging students to contemplate timely questions of American identity across its selected span of US theatrical history.
Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the crux of the encounter between consciousness and the visible world. Tracing a historical continuum of "acts of seeing" on the realist stage, Holzapfel demonstrates how theatre participated in modernity’s aggressive interrogation of vision’s residence in the human body. New findings by scientists and philosophers—such as Diderot, Goethe, Müller, Helmholtz, and Galton—exposed how the visible world is experienced and framed by the unstable relativism of the physiological body rather than the fixed idealism of the mind. Realist artists across media paradoxically embraced this paradigm shift by focusing on the embodied observer. Drawing from extensive archival research, Holzapfel conducts close readings of iconic dramas and their productions—including Scribe’s The Glass of Water, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Ibsen’s A Doll House, Strindberg’s The Father, and Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise—alongside analyses of artwork by major painters and photographers—such as Chardin, Nadar, Millais, Rejlander, and Liebermann. In a radical challenge to existing criticism, Holzapfel argues that realism in theatre was never the attempt to reproduce an exact copy of the seen world but rather the struggle to make visible the act of seeing.
This volume explores the history of American drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It describes origins of early republican drama and its evolution during the pre-war and post-war periods. It traces the emergence of different types of American drama including protest plays, reform drama, political drama, experimental drama, urban plays, feminist drama and realist plays. This volume also analyzes the works of some of the most notable American playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and those written by women dramatists.
This book examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre and compares the American genre to its British counterpart.
An expanded and updated edition of this acclaimed, wide-ranging survey of musical theatre in New York, London, and elsewhere.
In nineteenth-century Europe the ruling elites viewed the theater as a form of communication which had enormous importance. The theater provided the most significant form of mass entertainment and was the only arena aside from the church in which regular mass gatherings were possible. Therefore, drama censorship occupied a great deal of the ruling class’s time and energy, with a particularly focus on proposed scripts that potentially threatened the existing political, legal, and social order. This volume provides the first comprehensive examination of nineteenth-century political theater censorship at a time, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, when the European population was becoming increasingly politically active.
2017 Theatre Library Association Freedley Award Finalist In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens. London in a Box chronicles the enterprise of David Douglass, founder and manager of the American Theatre, from the 1750s to the climactic 1770s. How he built this network of patrons and theatres and how it all went up in flames as the revolution began is the subject of this witty history. A treat for anyone interested in the world of the American Revolution and an important study for historians of the period.