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How popular theater, including blackface characters, reflected and influenced attitudes toward race, the slave trade, and ideas of liberty in early America. Jenna M. Gibbs explores the world of theatrical and related print production on both sides of the Atlantic in an age of remarkable political and social change. Her deeply researched study of working-class and middling entertainment covers the period of the American Revolution through the first half of the nineteenth century, examining controversies over the place of black people in the Anglo-American moral imagination. Taking a transatlantic and nearly century-long view, Performing the Temple of Liberty draws on a wide range of performed...
A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States “One of the richest books ever to come my way.”—Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News “This is a wonderful book. . . . An extraordinary achievement.”—Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. S...
Saxton asks why white racism remained an ideological force in America long after the need to justify slavery and Western conquest had disappeared.
Adventure fiction is one of the easiest narrative forms to recognize but one of the hardest to define because of its overlap with many other genres. This collection of essays attempts to characterize adventure fiction through the exploration of key elements--such as larger-than-life characters and imperialistic ideas--in the genre's 19th- and 20th-century British and American works like The Scarlet Pimpernel by Orczy and Captain Blood by Sabatini. The author explores the cultural and literary impact of such works, presenting forgotten classics in a new light.
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The Medical Imagination traces the practice of using imagination and literature to craft, test, and implement theories of health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. This history of imaginative experimentation provides a usable past for conversations about the role of the humanities in health research and practice today.
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.
In Philadelphia Stories, Samuel Otter finds literary value, historical significance, and political urgency in a sequence of texts written in and about Philadelphia between the Constitution and the Civil War. Historians such as Gary B. Nash and Julie Winch have chronicled the distinctive social and political space of early national Philadelphia. Yet while individual writers such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Lippard have been linked to Philadelphia, no sustained attempt has been made to understand these figures, and many others, as writing in a tradition tied to the city's history. The site of William Penn's "Holy Experiment" in religious toleration and representative...
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The American literary canon has undergone revision and expansion in recent years, and our notions of the 19th-century renaissance have been reevaluated. Mainstream anthologies have been revised to reflect the expanding literary canon, yet resources for readers have remained widely scattered. This book expands earlier definitions of the 19th-century American Renaissance as represented by canonical writers such as Emerson and Poe, covering writers who published popular fiction and dominated the literary marketplace of the day. Included is generous coverage of women writers and writers of color. The volume provides alphabetically arranged entries for more than 70 writers of the period, including Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and many more. Each entry was written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies.