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Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian-era society as critically as witnessing or suffering from illness. The prevalence of illness narratives within late nineteenth-century popular culture was made manifest on the period’s British and American stages, where theatrical embodiments of illness were indisputable staples of actors’ repertoires. Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine reconstructs how actors embodied three of the era’s most provocative illnesses: tuberculosis, drug addiction, and mental illness. In placing performances of illness within wider medicocultural contexts, Meredith Conti analyzes how such d...
"Symptoms of the Self offers the first full study of one of the most paradoxically popular figures in transatlantic theatre history: the stage consumptive. Consumption, or tuberculosis, remains one of the world's most deadly epidemic diseases; in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Britain, and North America, it was a leading killer, responsible for the deaths of as many as one in four members of the population. Despite-or perhaps because of-their horrific experiences of tubercular mortality, throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century audiences in these same countries flocked to see consumptive characters love, suffer, and die onstage. Beginning with th...
In Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).
Ellen Emerson may be the last living survivor of the Johnstown flood. She was only four years old on May 31, 1889, when twenty million tons of water decimated her hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Thousands perished in what was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history at the time. As we witness in The Johnstown Girls, the flood not only changed the course of history, but also the individual lives of those who survived it. A century later, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporters Ben Bragdon and Nina Collins set out to interview 103-year-old Ellen for Ben's feature article on the flood. When asked the secret to her longevity, Ellen simply attributes it to "restlessness." As we see, that restles...
Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in twentieth- and twenty‐first-century performance. It brings together carefully chosen sites of performance—including live broadcasts of theatrical productions, reality television, and alternate-reality gaming—in which mediatization and mimesis compete and collude to represent the real to audiences. Lindsay Brandon Hunter reads such performances as forcing confrontation between notions of authenticity, sincerity, and spontaneity and their various others: the fake, the feigned, the staged, or the rehearsed. Each site examined in Playing Real purports t...
This collection of essays explores the rise of scientific medicine and its impact on Victorian popular culture. Chapters include an examination of Charles Dickens's involvement with hospital funding, concerns over milk purity and the theatrical portrayal of drug addiction, plus a whole section devoted to the representation of medicine in crime fiction. This is an interdisciplinary study involving public health, cultural studies, the history of medicine, literature and the theatre, providing new insights into Victorian culture and society.
An inclusive history of the professionalization of American scenic design The figure of the American theatrical scenic designer first emerged in the early twentieth century. As productions moved away from standardized, painted scenery and toward individualized scenic design, the demand for talented new designers grew. Within decades, scenic designers reinvented themselves as professional artists. They ran their own studios, proudly displayed their names on Broadway playbills, and even appeared in magazine and television profiles. American Scenic Design and Freelance Professionalism tells the history of the field through the figures, institutions, and movements that helped create and shape th...
Explores the potential of movement to create and revise historical narratives of race and nation
"The American Pipe Dream examines the representational history of addiction on the U.S. stage from 1890 to the start of the nation's involvement in the second World War in 1941. Through intensive archival work, textual and performance analysis, and by considering related literary, legislative, and medical histories, this work argues that performance was essential in the creation of the drug addict in the U.S. cultural imagination. Though little attention has been paid to the figure of the stage-addict, this conventionalized figure was a major presence in U.S. popular entertainment through the Progressive Era into the Roaring Twenties, and through the Great Depression. The aim of this study is to trace this complex history, establish the stage-addict's place in U.S. theatre studies, and, by doing so, provide a new lens for examining the history of drug addiction and drug use in the U.S"--