Melodrama Unveiled

Melodrama Unveiled PDF Author: David Grimsted
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520059962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the least common denominator of social values and concerns. In considering both the context and content of popular culture, Grimsted's book suggests how theater reflected the rapidly changing society of antebellum America.

Melodrama Unveiled

Melodrama Unveiled PDF Author: David Grimsted
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520059962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book Here

Book Description
David Grimsted's Melodrama Unveiled explores early American drama to try to understand why such severely limited plays were so popular for so long. Concerned with both the plays and the dramatic settings that gave them life, Grimsted offers us rich descriptions of the interaction of performers, audiences, critics, managers, and stage mechanics. Because these plays had to appeal immediately and directly to diverse audiences, they provide dramatic clues to the least common denominator of social values and concerns. In considering both the context and content of popular culture, Grimsted's book suggests how theater reflected the rapidly changing society of antebellum America.

Melodrama

Melodrama PDF Author: Jacqueline S. Bratton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
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The Art of Democracy

The Art of Democracy PDF Author: Jim Cullen
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583670653
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The highly acclaimed first edition of The Art of Democracy won the 1996 Ray and Pat Brown Award for "Best Book," presented by the Popular Culture Association.

Performing Disunion

Performing Disunion PDF Author: Lawrence T. McDonnell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316887006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
This book traces how and why the secession of the South during the American Civil War was accomplished at ground level through the actions of ordinary men. Adopting a micro-historical approach, Lawrence T. McDonnell works to connect small events in new ways - he places one company of the secessionist Minutemen in historical context, exploring the political and cultural dynamics of their choices. Every chapter presents little-known characters whose lives and decisions were crucial to the history of Southern disunion. McDonnell asks readers to consider the past with fresh eyes, analyzing the structure and dynamics of social networks and social movements. He presents the dissolution of the Union through new events, actors, issues, and ideas, illuminating the social contradictions that cast the South's most conservative city as the radical heart of Dixie.

Orgies of Feeling

Orgies of Feeling PDF Author: Elisabeth R. Anker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376547
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Melodrama is not just a film or literary genre but a powerful political discourse that galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence. Finding virtue in national suffering and heroism in sovereign action, melodramatic political discourses cast war and surveillance as moral imperatives for eradicating villainy and upholding freedom. In Orgies of Feeling, Elisabeth R. Anker boldly reframes political theories of sovereignty, freedom, and power by analyzing the work of melodrama and affect in contemporary politics. Arguing that melodrama animates desires for unconstrained power, Anker examines melodramatic discourses in the War on Terror, neoliberal politics, anticommunist rhetoric, Hollywood film, and post-Marxist critical theory. Building on Friedrich Nietzsche's notion of "orgies of feeling," in which overwhelming emotions displace commonplace experiences of vulnerability and powerlessness onto a dramatic story of injured freedom, Anker contends that the recent upsurge in melodrama in the United States is an indication of public discontent. Yet the discontent that melodrama reflects is ultimately an expression of the public's inability to overcome systemic exploitation and inequality rather than an alarmist response to inflated threats to the nation.

The Richmond Theater Fire

The Richmond Theater Fire PDF Author: Meredith Henne Baker
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143758
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
On the day after Christmas in 1811, the state of Virginia lost its governor and almost one hundred citizens in a devastating nighttime fire that consumed a Richmond playhouse.The gruesome fire amplified the capital's reputation for vice and led to an upsurge in anti-theater criticism that spread throughout the country and across the Atlantic. In The Richmond Theater Fire, the first book about the event and its aftermath, Meredith Henne Baker explores a forgotten catastrophe and its wide societal impact. The story of transformation comes alive through survivor accounts of slaves, actresses, ministers, and statesmen. Investigating private letters, diaries, and sermons, among other rare or unpublished documents, Baker views the event and its outcomes through the fascinating lenses of early nineteenth-century theater, architecture, and faith, and reveals a rich and vital untold story from America's past.

Next Week--East Lynne

Next Week--East Lynne PDF Author: Gilbert B. Cross
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838716465
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Examines plot, character, setting, and spectacle, viewing the plays in performance. Discusses the importance of costume, makeup, gesture, and audience participation, and relates the subject matter of the plays to contemporary society, especially as it reflected England's change from a semi-feudal to an increasingly democratic society. Illustrated.

The Cambridge History of American Theatre

The Cambridge History of American Theatre PDF Author: Don B. Wilmeth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521472043
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
The Cambridge History of American Theatre is an authoritative and wide-ranging history of American theatre in all its dimensions, from theatre building to play writing, directors, performers, and designers. Engaging the theatre as a performance art, a cultural institution, and a fact of American social and political life, the History recognizes changing styles of presentation and performance and addresses the economic context that conditions the drama presented. The History approaches its subject with a full awareness of relevant developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory. At the same time, it is designed to be an accessible, challenging narrative. Volume One deals with the colonial inceptions of American theatre through the post-Civil War period: the European antecedents, the New World influences of the French and Spanish colonists, and the development of uniquely American traditions in tandem with the emergence of national identity.

The Maniac in the Cellar

The Maniac in the Cellar PDF Author: Winifred Hughes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400855470
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Once a controversial genre of Victorian fiction that produced the major best sellers of its century, the now-forgotten sensation novel was a publishing phenomenon in its time. In a vivid portrait of this subversive and discomfiting popular literature, Winifred Hughes identifies its ingredients, its practitioners, and its implications, and reveals its significance both for the mid-Victorian consciousness and for the writers and readers of today. Originally published in 1981. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism PDF Author: Keith Newlin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195368932
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
After its heyday in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, naturalism, a genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces over which they have little control, was supplanted by modernism, a genre in which writers experimented with innovations in form and content. In the last decade, the movement is again attracting spirited scholarly debate. The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism takes stock of the best new research in the field through collecting twenty-eight original essays drawing upon recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies. The contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, and Cormac McCarthy. One set of essays focus on the genre itself, exploring the historical contexts that gave birth to it, the problem of definition, its interconnections with other genres, the scientific and philosophical ideas that motivate naturalist authors, and the continuing presence of naturalism in twenty-first century fiction. Others examine the tensions within the genre-the role of women and African-American writers, depictions of sexuality, the problem of race, and the critique of commodity culture and class. A final set of essays looks beyond the works to consider the role of the marketplace in the development of naturalism, the popular and critical response to the works, and the influence of naturalism in the other arts.