Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage

by Sarah E. Chinn

Overview

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190653675
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/29/2017
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Sarah E. Chinn is Associate Professor of English at Hunter College at the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Advancing the interests of private and political virtue": The stakes of the early American stage
Chapter 1: "The Imitation of Life": How Men Act
Chapter 2: American Actors/Acting American
Chapter 3: "O patriotism!/ Thou wond'rous principle of god-like action!": The Changing Meanings of the Revolution
Chapter 4: Love and Death: Staging Indigenous Masculinity
Chapter 5: Tyrants, Republicans, and Rebels: Performing Roman Masculinities
Epilogue: From Sons of Liberty to Wage Slaves
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Engagingly written, featuring a thorough but by no means overwhelming scholarly apparatus, and reflecting keen awareness of the paradoxes that would lead the "true blue Sons of Liberty" of the 1780s to see themselves as wage slaves by the 1840s, Chinn's book is a welcome entry into the field of early American theater studies. She ably tackles the contingent nature of the class, gender, and racial identities that underpinned so much of the early history of the American theater — and of the United States itself." — Jason Shaffer, Early American Literature

"Chinn [provides] tantalizing glimpses into the elusive minds and possible motivations of the working-class men who filled urban playhouses. While these men yearned for entertainment, they also craved validation and possibly even guidance. In Spectacular Men, Chinn asks all the right questions, effectively drawing the reader into this complex period, challenging their assumptions, and complicating their understanding of the men and plays shaping each other." —Natasha Moore, 19th Century Literature

"...Spectacular Men's focus crucially shows how a certain strain of masculinity could in fact come to appear monolithic, absolute, inevitable, and natural. That might be one of this study's more important contributions, unpacking as it does the building of normative identity formations. In the process, it becomes apparent that the story of American masculinity is also a story of how gender ideologies could be peddled for profit, reiterated until they seemed natural, and eventually experienced as pleasurable despite the underlying battery of anxieties and insecurities on which they were inevitably based." —Peter Reed, The New England Quarterly

"A challenging, informed critical effort with superb textual notes and bibliography, this volume makes an enormous contribution to theater and cultural studies. ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals." —D. B. Wilmeth, CHOICE

From the Publisher