Stage Page Scandals And Vandals

Burton fled England in 1834 and came to America in the wake of a public scandal caused by his marriage to a sixteen-year-old orphan. Burton was then already married with a ten-year-old son. Settling in Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old actor rapidly established himself in the city's theatrical productions and quickly became an audience favorite.

Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. The book's examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy and further explores links between the Bowery Boy's rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.

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.

In The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848-1920, Karen E. Laird alternates between readings of nineteenth-century stage and twentieth-century silent film adaptations to investigate the working practices of the first adapters of Victorian fiction. Laird’s juxtaposition between stage and screen brings to life the dynamic culture of literary adaptation as it developed throughout the long nineteenth-century. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Laird demonstrates how adaptations performed the valuable cultural work of expanding the original novel’s readership across class and gender divides, exporting the English novel to America, and commemorating the novelists through adaptations that functioned as virtual literary tourism. Bridging the divide between literary criticism, film studies, and theatre history, Laird’s book reveals how the Victorian adapters set the stage for our contemporary film adaptation industry.

In The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920, Karen E. Laird alternates between readings of nineteenth-century stage and twentieth-century silent film adaptations to demonstrate the working practices of the first adapters of Victorian fiction. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Laird charts a new cultural history of literary adaptation as it developed throughout the long nineteenth-century.

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.

"Drawing on underexplored and only recently available archives, author Chrystyna Dail examines the influence of Stage for Action--a significant yet previously unstudied agitprop theatre group founded in 1943--on social activist theatre in the 1940s, early 1950s, and beyond"--

"This study of the daily work lives of five members of the Marsh Troupe, a nineteenth-century professional acting company composed primarily of children, sheds light on the construction of idealized childhood inside and outside the American theatre"--