Melodrama and the Myth of America

Melodrama and the Myth of America PDF Author: Jeffrey Daniel Mason
Publisher: Drama and Performance Studies
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Jeffrey Mason investigates the reasons for their popular success and reconstructs the social and political backdrop against which they were viewed. He shows how they functioned in the social discourse of the time as collective affirmations of certain cultural myths. Yet these acts of communal belief were played out on the contested stage of American ideological debate.

Melodrama and the Myth of America

Melodrama and the Myth of America PDF Author: Jeffrey Daniel Mason
Publisher: Drama and Performance Studies
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Jeffrey Mason investigates the reasons for their popular success and reconstructs the social and political backdrop against which they were viewed. He shows how they functioned in the social discourse of the time as collective affirmations of certain cultural myths. Yet these acts of communal belief were played out on the contested stage of American ideological debate.

Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama

Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama PDF Author: Megan Sanborn Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135967903
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
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.

Imitations of Life

Imitations of Life PDF Author: Louise McReynolds
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822327905
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
DIVUses the under-studied genre of melodrama as a critical prism for understanding Russian/Soviet history, politics and culture--in particular, the uses to which popular culture was put in the Soviet period./div

The American Play

The American Play PDF Author: Marc Robinson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300170041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
In this brilliant study, Marc Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has--and has not--changed and offers close readings of plays by O'Neill, Stein, Wilder, Miller, and Albee, as well as by important but perhaps lesser known dramatists such as Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and many others. Robinson reads each work in an ambitiously interdisciplinary context, linking advances in theater to developments in American literature, dance, and visual art. The author is particularly attentive to the continuities in American drama, and expertly teases out recurring themes, such as the significance of visuality. He avoids neatly categorizing nineteenth- and twentieth-century plays and depicts a theater more restive and mercurial than has been recognized before. Robinson proves both a fascinating and thought-provoking critic and a spirited guide to the history of American drama.

Staged Readings

Staged Readings PDF Author: Michael D'Alessandro
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472133179
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
How popular culture helped to create class in nineteenth-century America

The Musical

The Musical PDF Author: William Everett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135848076
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The musical, whether on stage or screen, is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable musical genres, yet one of the most perplexing. What are its defining features? How does it negotiate multiple socio-cultural-economic spaces? Is it a popular tradition? Is it a commercial enterprise? Is it a sophisticated cultural product and signifier? This research guide includes more than 1,400 annotated entries related to the genre as it appears on stage and screen. It includes reference works, monographs, articles, anthologies, and websites related to the musical. Separate sections are devoted to sub-genres (such as operetta and megamusical), non-English language musical genres in the U.S., traditions outside the U.S., individual shows, creators, performers, and performance. The second edition reflects the notable increase in musical theater scholarship since 2000. In addition to printed materials, it includes multimedia and electronic resources.

Edwin Forrest

Edwin Forrest PDF Author: Arthur W. Bloom
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476677549
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Edwin Forrest was the foremost American actor of the nineteenth century. His advocacy of American, and specifically Jacksonian, themes made him popular in New York's Bowery Theatre. His rivalry with the English tragedian William Charles Macready led to the Astor Place Riot, and his divorce from Catharine Sinclair Forrest was one of the greatest social scandals of the period. This full-length biography examines Forrest's personal life while acknowledging the impossibility of separating it from his public image. Included is a historical chronology of every known performance the actor gave.

Pioneer Performances

Pioneer Performances PDF Author: Matthew Rebhorn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190218649
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Pioneer Performances draws from a diverse cast of relevant historical figures, ultimately revealing the frontier as a set of complex performative practices imbued with a sense of trenchant social critique.

Historical Dictionary of American Theater

Historical Dictionary of American Theater PDF Author: James Fisher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 081087833X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1538 to 1880. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in American during the colonial era and the first century of the United States of America, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such figures as Lewis Hallam, David Douglass, Mercy Otis Warren, Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Ida Aldridge, Dion Boucicault, Edwin Booth, and many others. The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of early American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the early American Theater.

First Pure, Then Peaceable

First Pure, Then Peaceable PDF Author: Margaret Aymer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 056700239X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
In 2001, Continuum published the extensive collected papers from African Americans and the Bible, an interdisciplinary conference held at Union Theological Seminary, NYC. In the collection's introduction, Vincent L. Wimbush issued a challenge to take seriously those who "read darkness," and to consider what it is they are doing when they read the Bible as "scripture." Wimbush's focus on "darkness readers," both within and outside of the African diaspora, breaks open the discourse around the nature, meaning, and importance of the Bible. By following the lead of "darkness readers," the Bible is revealed to be more than a collection of ancient documents from an inaccessible past; it is the site upon which modern, contemporary ideological battles have and continue to be waged. In this book Margaret Aymer takes up his challenge. It is an examination of the way in which Frederick Douglass, the nineteenth-century abolitionist, used the epistle of James, particularly Jas 3:17, in his abolitionist speeches, to "read" the "darkness" of slavery and slaveholding Christianity. Within the epistle of James is a rhetoric of the world as "darkness". Douglass uses this to read his contemporary "darkness." As part of her research, Aymer has created an index of biblical references in all of Frederick Douglass' abolitionist speeches as collected by J. W. Blassingame (1841-1860).