“List your top ten playwrights from the nineteenth century. . . . Or name your top ten plays from the nineteenth century. How about your top five? Three?” So theater historian Matthew Rebhorn challenges readers in a recent J19 forum on American drama (“Introduction: ‘Nineteenth-Century’ ‘American’ ‘Theater’ and ‘Performance’” J19 6.2 [2018]: 391]. If you are drawing a blank, you are not alone. You may pause before reciting a few dramatic adaptations of novels or standby plays in anthologies (George Aiken’s dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1852], Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon [1859], maybe John Augustus Stone’s Metamora [1829]). Perhaps you are more comfortable naming certain genres of performance such as minstrelsy or melodrama? Or maybe you think of familiar images— “the one with the woman tied up on the train tracks”—even if, in fact, it is a shackled man in both dramatic versions (Augustin Daly’s Under the...
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Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans
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September 1, 2020
Book Review|
September 01 2020
Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans
Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States
Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans
. By Braun, Juliane. Charlottesville
: Univ. of Virginia Press
. 2019
. xv, 260 pp. Cloth, $69.50; paper, $35.00; e-book, $69.50.Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States
. By Mielke, Laura L.. Ann Arbor
: Univ. of Michigan Press
. 2019
. ix, 284 pp. Cloth, $75.00; e-book, $59.95.
Michael D’Alessandro
Michael D’Alessandro
Michael D’Alessandro is an assistant professor of English at Duke University. His articles have appeared in American Art, The New England Quarterly, Studies in American Naturalism, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Currently, he is working on a book project titled “Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Literature and Theatre, 1835–1875.”
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American Literature (2020) 92 (3): 589–591.
Citation
Michael D’Alessandro; Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans
Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States. American Literature 1 September 2020; 92 (3): 589–591. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8616223
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