Provocative Eloquence

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.

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference Theatre History Studies is the official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, Inc. (MATC). The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region that includes the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Its purposes are to unite people and organizations within this region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. Published annually since 1981, Theatre History Studies provides critical, analytical, and descriptive essays on all aspects of theatre history and is devoted to disseminating the highest quality peer-review scholarship in the field. CONTRIBUTORS Angela K. Ahlgren / Samer Al-Saber / Kelly I. Aliano / Gordon Alley-Young / Melissa Blanco Borelli / Trevor Boffone / Jay Buchanan / Matthieu Chapman / Joanna Dee Das / Ryan J. Douglas / Victoria Fortuna / Christiana Molldrem Harkulich / Alani Hicks-Bartlett / Jeanmarie Higgins / Lisa Jackson-Schebetta / Erin Rachel Kaplan / Heather Kelley / Patrick Maley / Karin Maresh / Lisa Milner / Courtney Elkin Mohler / Heather S. Nathans / Heidi L. Nees / Sebastian Samur / Michael Schweikardt / Teresa Simone / Dennis Sloan / Guilia Taddeo / Kyle A. Thomas / Alex Vermillion / Bethany Wood

Rome and America provides a timely exploration of the Roman and American founding myths in the cultural imagination. Defying the usual ideological categories, Dean Hammer argues for the exceptional nature of the myths as a journey of Strangers, but also traces the tensions created by the myths in attempts to answer the question of who We are. The wide-ranging chapters reassess both Roman antecedents and American expressions of the myth in some unexpected places: early American travelogues, westerns, bare-knuckle boxing, early American theater, government documents detailing Native American policy, and the writings of Noah Webster, W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Eastman. This innovative volume culminates in an interpretation of the current crisis of democracy as a reversion of the community back to Strangers, with suggestions of how the myth can recast a much-needed discussion of identity and belonging.

American culture maintained a complicated relationship with Haiti from its revolutionary beginnings onward. In this study, Peter P. Reed reveals how Americans embodied and re-enacted their connections to Haiti through a wide array of performance forms. In the wake of Haiti's slave revolts in the 1790s, generations of actors, theatre professionals, spectators, and commentators looked to Haiti as a source of both inspiring freedom and vexing disorder. French colonial refugees, university students, Black theatre stars, blackface minstrels, abolitionists, and even writers such as Herman Melville all reinvented and restaged Haiti in distinctive ways. Reed demonstrates how Haiti's example of Black freedom and national independence helped redefine American popular culture, as actors and audiences repeatedly invoked and suppressed Haiti's revolutionary narratives, characters, and themes. Ultimately, Haiti shaped generations of performances, transforming America's understandings of race, power, freedom, and violence in ways that still reverberate today.

Ranging from Cicero's Rome to contemporary politics, Words on Fire is a provocative rethinking of political eloquence for our time.

Examining activist performance techniques, this book shows how women and men could deeply influence public life in the nineteenth century.

Examines Gombrowicz's modernist aesthetics in the context of his critique of nationalism, his exploration of queer eroticism, and his interest in hybrid and subaltern identities.