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Shows how the earliest representations of Jewish characters on American stages mirrored treatment of Jewish Americans outside the playhouse
This 2003 book examines the growth and influence of the theatre in the development of the young American Republic.
For almost a hundred years before Uncle Tom's Cabin burst on to the scene in 1852, the American theatre struggled to represent the evils of slavery. Slavery and Sentiment examines how both black and white Americans used the theatre to fight negative stereotypes of African Americans in the United States.
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.
Shakespearean Educations expands the notion of 'education' beyond the classroom to literary clubs, private salons, public lectures, libraries, primers, and theatrical performance. This collection challenges scholars to consider how different groups in our society have adopted Shakespeare as part of a specifically 'American' education. This book maps the ways in which former slaves, Puritan ministers, university leaders, and working class theatergoers used Shakespeare not only to educate themselves about literature and culture, but also to educate others about their own experience.
In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery’s defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As antislavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.
The English literary influence on classic American novelists’ depictions of gender, sexuality, and race With All the Devils Are Here, the literary scholar David Greven makes a signal contribution to the growing list of studies dedicated to tracing threads of literary influence. Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s uses of Shakespeare and Milton, he finds, reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. Greven limns the effect of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing on Hawthorne’s exploration of patriarchy, and he shows how misogyny in King Lear informed Melville’s evocation of “the step-mother world” of orphaned men in Moby-Dick. Throughout, Greven focuses particularly on male authors’ treatment of femininity, arguing that the figure of woman functions for them as a multivalent signifier for artistic expression. Ultimately, Greven demonstrates the ambitions of these writers to comment on the history of the Western tradition and the future of art from their unique positions as Americans.
In this book, Elisabeth H. Kinsley weaves the stories of racially and ethnically distinct Shakespeare theatre scenes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Manhattan into a single cultural history, revealing how these communities interacted with one another and how their work influenced ideas about race and belonging in the United States during a time of unprecedented immigration. As Progressive Era reformers touted the works of Shakespeare as an “antidote” to the linguistic and cultural mixing of American society, and some reformers attempted to use the Bard’s plays to “Americanize” immigrant groups on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, immigrants from across Europe appropria...
Researching Popular Entertainment is an essential volume for scholars delving into the vibrant yet complex world of popular entertainment. Written by a global network of experts, this book addresses the unique challenges researchers face in this field. The often-dismissed status of popular entertainment, coupled with its reliance on physicality and improvisation over scripted performances, has meant archival and textual sources tend to be more limited than in related theatre and performance disciplines. This scarcity requires historians to find alternative pathways through the available materials to recuperate seemingly insignificant figures and performance forms from our cultural past. This...
During the many years that they were separated by the perils of the American Revolution, John and Abigail Adams exchanged hundreds of letters. Writing to each other of public events and private feelings, loyalty and love, revolution and parenting, they wove a tapestry of correspondence that has become a cherished part of American history and literature. With Abigail and John Adams, historian G. J. Barker-Benfield mines those familiar letters to a new purpose: teasing out the ways in which they reflected—and helped transform—a language of sensibility, inherited from Britain but, amid the revolutionary fervor, becoming Americanized. Sensibility—a heightened moral consciousness of feeling...