Melodrama and the Myth of America

Name: Melodrama and the Myth of America
Price: 5.19 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780253336866

ISBN-10: 0253336864

ISBN-13: 9780253336866

Edition: 1993

Authors: Jeffrey D. Mason

List price: $31.95

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Description:

"In nineteenth-century America, popular theatre acted as the vehicle for the construction of a national ideology. Melodrama and the Myth of America looks at five popular plays that took as their subjects important issues in American life: Metamora and the "Indian" Question, The Drunkard and the temperance movement, Uncle Tom's Cabin and slavery, My Partner and the American West, and Shenandoah and the Civil War. These plays present American history as a grand melodrama. Jeffrey Mason investigates the reasons for their popular success and reconstructs the social and political backdrop against which they were viewed. He shows how they functioned in the social discourse of the time as…

Book details

List price: $31.95
Copyright year: 1993
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 268
Size: 6.25" wide x 9.50" long x 0.75" tall
Weight: 1.386
Language: English



Preface



Constructing American Ideology


Ideology and Myth


The Sentimental Vision


Melodrama


America/America



Metamora (1829) and the "Indian" Question


King Philip's War


Savagism


The Romantic Warrior


Edwin Forrest, American


Metamora


Indian Removal


The Sachem's Audience



The Drunkard (1844) and the Temperance Movement


The Politics of Drinking in Antebellum America


The Temperance Message


The Temperance Narrative


Melodrama and the Narrative


The Drunkard


The Operations of Discourse



Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the Politics of Race


The Slave System


Abolitionism and Racism


The Colonization Movement


The Good Samaritan


The Sentimental Argument


Racialism and Missis Harriet


Breakdown


The Safety of the Stage



My Partner (1879) and the West


The West


The Discourse of California


My Partner


The Pastoral Mines


The "Chinee"


Paradise Lost



Shenandoah (1889) and the Civil War


The Myth of the War


The Veterans' Myth on Stage


The Rationale of War


War as Romance


Shenandoah


Reconstruction on Stage



Staging the Myth of America


The Discourse and Conventions of America


America, the Sentimental


The American Space


American History as Melodrama


Notes


Bibliography


Index