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This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society. It shows how the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized models of social exchange and organization.
Tom-Mania looks at the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the songs, plays, sketches, translations and imitations it inspired. In particular it shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how the novel was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized and politicised.
In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas. These melodramas illustrated a particularly religious world-view that dominated American life and promoted the sexually conservative ideals of the cult of true womanhood. They also examined the limits of honorable violence, and suggested the whiteness of national ethnicity. In investigating the relationship between theatre, popular literature, political rhetoric, and religious fervor, Megan Sanborn Jones reveals how anti-Mormon melodramas created a space for audiences to imagine a unified American identity.
Shows how theater was essential to the anti-slavery movement's consideration of forceful resistance
Staged Readings studies the social consequences of 19th-century America’s two most prevalent leisure forms: theater and popular literature. In the midst of watershed historical developments—including numerous waves of immigration, two financial Panics, increasing wealth disparities, and the Civil War—American theater and literature were developing at unprecedented rates. Playhouses became crowded with new spectators, best-selling novels flew off the shelves, and, all the while, distinct social classes began to emerge. While the middle and upper classes were espousing conservative literary tastes and attending family matinees and operas, laborers were reading dime novels and watching downtown spectacle melodramas like Nymphs of the Red Sea and The Pirate’s Signal or, The Bridge of Death!!! As audiences traveled from the reading parlor to the playhouse (and back again), they accumulated a vital sense of social place in the new nation. In other words, culture made class in 19th-century America. Based in the historical archive, Staged Readings presents a panoramic display of mid-century leisure and entertainment. It examines best-selling novels, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and George Lippard’s The Quaker City. But it also analyzes a series of sensational melodramas, parlor theatricals, doomsday speeches, tableaux vivant displays, curiosity museum exhibits, and fake volcano explosions. These oft-overlooked spectacles capitalized on consumers’ previous cultural encounters and directed their social identifications. The book will be particularly appealing to those interested in histories of popular theater, literature and reading, social class, and mass culture.
SHAKESPEARE STUDIES is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its socio-political history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern literature. Volume XXXVIII features another in the journal's ongoing series of Forums on an issue of importance to Renaissance studies. Organised and introduced by Greg Colon Semenza, this Forum, 'After Shakespeare and Film', includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of nine contributors on the positioning of Shakespeare studies in digital and other contemporary technologies. The volume also features an article on representing 'blackness' in Shakespearean productions from 1821 to 1844, and another on the influence of 19th-century melodrama on the Shakespeare critical tradition, as well as a review article on 'Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain'. Reviews in this issue address such disparate topics as Shakespeare and the problem of adaptation, Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine, and locating privacy in Tudor England.
This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. Addressing these issues from a variety of different angles, including historical, aesthetic, cultural, phenomenological, and psychological approaches, these essays present a complex picture of the cultural work and passionate politics accomplished by melodrama over the course of the past two centuries, particularly at times of profound social change.
Before phonographs and moving pictures, live performances dominated American popular entertainment. Carnivals, circuses, dioramas, magicians, mechanical marvels, musicians, and theatrical troupes—all visited rural fairgrounds, small-town opera houses, and big-city palaces around the country, giving millions of people an escape from their everyday lives for a dime or a quarter. In From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, Robert M. Lewis has assembled a remarkable collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century primary sources that document America's age of theatrical spectacle. In eight parts, Lewis explores, in turn, dime museums, minstrelsy, circuses, melodramas, burlesque shows, Wild West shows, amusement parks, and vaudeville. Included in this compendium are biographies, programs, ephemera produced by theatrical entrepreneurs to lure audiences to their shows, photographs, scripts, and song lyrics as well as newspaper accounts, reviews, and interviews with such figures as P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill Cody. Lewis also gives us reminiscences about and reactions to various shows by members of audiences, including such prominent writers as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Carl Sandburg, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, and Maxim Gorky. Each section also includes a concise introduction that places the genre of spectacle into its historical and cultural context and suggests major interpretive themes. The book closes with a bibliographic essay that identifies relevant scholarly works. Many of the pieces collected here have not been published since their first appearance, making From Traveling Show to Vaudeville an indispensable resource for historians of popular culture, theater, and nineteenth-century American society.
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.