Items related to Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early...

Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History) - Softcover

Reed, P.

 
9781349374663: Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1349374660 ISBN 13: 9781349374663
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Synopsis

Rogue Performances recovers eighteenth and nineteenth-century American culture s fascination with outcast and rebellious characters. Highwaymen, thieves, beggars, rioting mobs, rebellious slaves, and mutineers dominated the stage in the period s most popular plays. Peter Reed also explores ways these characters helped to popularize theatrical forms such as ballad opera, patriotic spectacle, blackface minstrelsy, and melodrama. Reed shows how both on and offstage, these paradoxically powerful, persistent, and troubling figures reveal the contradictions of class and the force of the disempowered in the American theatrical imagination. Through analysis of both well known and lesser known plays and extensive archival research, this book challenges scholars to re-think their assumptions about the role of class in antebellum American drama.

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About the Author


PETER P. REED is Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Mississippi, USA.

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date
2009
Language
English
ISBN 10 
1349374660
ISBN 13 
9781349374663
Binding
Paperback
Edition number
1
Number of pages
261