Melodramatic Formations

Melodramatic Formations
Author: Bruce A. McConachie
Publisher: Studies Theatre Hist & Culture
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1992
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN:

Melodramatic Tactics

Melodramatic Tactics
Author: Elaine Hadley
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780804724036

This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society. It shows how the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized models of social exchange and organization.

Uncle Tom Mania

Uncle Tom Mania
Author: Sarah Meer
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780820327372

Tom-Mania looks at the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the songs, plays, sketches, translations and imitations it inspired. In particular it shows how the theatrical mode of blackface minstrelsy, the slavery question, and America's emerging cultural identity affected how the novel was read, discussed, dramatized, merchandized and politicised.

Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama

Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama
Author: Megan Sanborn Jones
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2009-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135967903

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.

Pictorial Illusionism

Pictorial Illusionism
Author: J. A. Sokalski
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2007-04-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0773578080

Drawing together a wealth of primary sources, J.A. Sokalski examines the aims, inventions, and methods of the pictorial style that defined MacKaye's art. Sokalski shows how MacKaye's famous Madison Square Theatre, which featured a double stage reminiscent of an elevator, created whirling pictorial illusions for fashionable New York. He argues that MacKaye's infamous failure, the colossal Spectatorium theatre for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, was the most complete realization of this illusionary aesthetic. Sokalski also explores MacKaye's influence on Buffalo Bill Cody and how civil war cycloramas expanded his concept of pictorial space.

Dickens's Villains

Dickens's Villains
Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2003
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780199261376

This study argues that Dickens' villains embody the crucial fusion between the deviant and theatrical aspects of his writing.

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama

The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama
Author: Carolyn Williams
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018-10-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 110709593X

A lively and accessible account of the most popular form of nineteenth-century English theatre, and its continuing influence today.

Staged Readings

Staged Readings
Author: Michael D'Alessandro
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2022-09-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472220586

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.

Shakespeare Studies

Shakespeare Studies
Author: Susan Zimmerman
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2010-09
Genre: English drama
ISBN: 0838642705

SHAKESPEARE STUDIES is an international volume published every year in hard cover that contains essays and studies by critics and cultural historians from both hemispheres. Although the journal maintains a focus on the theatrical milieu of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, it is also concerned with Britain's intellectual and cultural connections to the continent, its socio-political history, and its place in the emerging globalism of the period. In addition to articles, the journal includes substantial reviews of significant publications dealing with these issues, as well as theoretical studies relevant to scholars of early modern literature. Volume XXXVIII features another in the journal's ongoing series of Forums on an issue of importance to Renaissance studies. Organised and introduced by Greg Colon Semenza, this Forum, 'After Shakespeare and Film', includes the interdisciplinary perspectives of nine contributors on the positioning of Shakespeare studies in digital and other contemporary technologies. The volume also features an article on representing 'blackness' in Shakespearean productions from 1821 to 1844, and another on the influence of 19th-century melodrama on the Shakespeare critical tradition, as well as a review article on 'Shakespeare and the Gothic Strain'. Reviews in this issue address such disparate topics as Shakespeare and the problem of adaptation, Renaissance culture and the rise of the machine, and locating privacy in Tudor England.

Passionate Politics

Passionate Politics
Author: Ralph J. Poole
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443809535

This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. Addressing these issues from a variety of different angles, including historical, aesthetic, cultural, phenomenological, and psychological approaches, these essays present a complex picture of the cultural work and passionate politics accomplished by melodrama over the course of the past two centuries, particularly at times of profound social change.