Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans

Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans PDF Author: Heather Nathans
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130307
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how the earliest representations of Jewish characters on American stages mirrored treatment of Jewish Americans outside the playhouse

Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans

Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans PDF Author: Heather Nathans
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130307
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Shows how the earliest representations of Jewish characters on American stages mirrored treatment of Jewish Americans outside the playhouse

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature

Sensationalism and the Jew in Antebellum American Literature PDF Author: David Anthony
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192699733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the charged but mostly overlooked presence of the sensational Jew in antebellum literature. This stereotyped character appears primarily in the pulpy sensation fiction of popular writers like George Lippard, Ned Buntline, Emerson Bennett, and others. But this figure also plays an important role in the sometimes sensational work of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. Whatever the medium, this character, always overdetermined, does consistent cultural work. This book contends that, as the figure who embodies money and capitalism in the antebellum imagination, the sensational Jew is the character who most fully represents a felt anxiety about the increasingly unstable nature of a range of social categories in the antebellum US, and the sense of loss and self-hatred so often lurking in the background of modern Gentile identity. Each chapter examines a different form of sensationalism (urban gothic; sentimental city mysteries; anti-Tom plantation narratives; etc.), and a different set of anxieties (threats to class status; collapsing regional identity; the uncertain status of Whiteness and other racial categories; etc.). Throughout, the sensational Jew acts both as a figure of proteophobia (fear of disorder and ambivalence), and as the figure who embodies in uncanny form a more fulfilling and socially coherent form of identity that predates the modern liberal selfhood of the post-Enlightenment world. The sensational Jew is therefore a revealing figure in antebellum culture, as well as an important antecedent to contemporary antisemitism in the US.

Redface

Redface PDF Author: Bethany Hughes
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479829404
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics

The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics PDF Author: John D. Kerkering
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108841899
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume addresses the political contexts in which nineteenth-century American literature was conceived, consumed, and criticized. It shows how a variety of literary genres and forms, such as poetry, drama, fiction, oratory, and nonfiction, engaged with political questions and participated in political debate.

First Lady of Laughs

First Lady of Laughs PDF Author: Grace Kessler Overbeke
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479818151
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Piecing together the forgotten story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish female stand-up comedian, this book reveals the history of women in comedy, American Jews, and how stand-up found its feet"--

The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman

The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman PDF Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192647784
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 721

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.

Provocative Eloquence

Provocative Eloquence PDF Author: Laura L. Mielke
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472124374
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828

American Literature in Transition, 1770–1828 PDF Author: William Huntting Howell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108617042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 672

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume presents a complex portrait of the United States of America grappling with the trials of national adolescence. Topics include (but are not limited to): the dynamics of language and power, the treachery of memory, the lived experience of racial and economic inequality, the aesthetics of Indigeneity, the radical possibilities of disability, the fluidity of gender and sexuality, the depth and culture-making power of literary genre, the history of poetics, the cult of performance, and the hidden costs of foodways. Taken together, the essays offer a vision of a vibrant, contradictory, and conflicted early US Republic resistant to consensus accountings and poised to inform new and better origin stories for the polity to come.

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre PDF Author: Harvey Young
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009359592
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new edition provides an expanded, comprehensive history of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the New Negro and Black Arts movements, the Companion also features fresh chapters on significant contemporary developments, such as the influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, the mainstream successes of Black Queer Drama and the evolution of African American Dance Theatre. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights, and actors who have fashioned a more accurate appearance of Black life on stage, revealing the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and around the world. Addressing recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change, it invites readers to reflect on where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.

Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles

Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles PDF Author: Marlis Schweitzer
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387368
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the possibilities and the problems girl performers presented as they adopted the manners and clothing of boys, entered spaces intended for adults, and assumed characters written for men. It asks why masculine roles like Young Norval, Richard III, Little Pickle, and Shylock came to seem “normal” and “natural” for young white girls to play, and it considers how playwrights, managers, critics, and audiences sought to contain or fix the at-times dangerous plasticity they exhibited both on and off the stage. Schweitzer analyzes the formation of a distinct repertoire for girls in the first half of the nineteenth century, which delighted in precocity and playfulness and offered up a model of girlhood that was similarly joyful and fluid. This evolving repertoire reflected shifting perspectives on girls’ place within Anglo-American society, including where and how they should behave, and which girls had the right to appear at all.