The Dramatic Year Book For The Year Ending December 31st 1891

For over 150 years, Irish playwrights, beginning with Dion Boucicault, have been celebrated by American audiences. However, Irish theater as represented on the American stage is a selective version of the national drama, and the underlying causes for Irish dramatic success in America illuminate the cultural state of both countries at specific historical moments. Irish Theater in America is the first book devoted entirely to the long history of this transatlantic exchange. Born out of the conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora project, this collection gathers together leading American and Irish scholars, in addition to established theater critics. Contributors explore the history of Irish theater in America from Harrigan and Hart, through some of the greatest and most disappointing Irish tours of America, to the most contemporary productions of senior Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and younger writers such as Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson. Covering the complexity of the relationship between Irish theater and the United States, this volume goes beyond the expected analysis of plays to include examinations of company dynamics, analysis of audience reception, and reviews of production history of individual works. Contents include: Mick Moloney, "Harrigan, Hart, and Braham: Irish-America and the Birth of the American Musical" Nicholas Grene, "Faith Healer in New York and Dublin" Lucy McDiarmid, "The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913" Christina Hunt Mahony, "’The Irish Play’: Beyond the Generic"

A review and record of current literature.

Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of the stage consumptive. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, tuberculosis was a leading killer. Its famous dramatic and operatic victims—Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias and her avatar Violetta in La Traviata, Mimì in La Bohème, Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, to name but a few—are among the most iconic figures of the Western stage. Its classic symptoms, the cough and the blood-stained handkerchief, have become global performance shorthand for life-threatening illness. The consumptive character became a vehicle through which standards of health, beauty, and virtue were imposed; constructions of class, gender, and sexuality were debated; the boundaries of nationhood were transgressed or maintained; and an exceedingly fragile whiteness was held up as a dominant social ideal. By telling the story of tuberculosis on the transatlantic stage, Symptoms of the Self uncovers some of the wellsprings of modern Western theatrical practice—and of ideas about the self that still affect the way human beings live and die.