This book examines the role of temperance drama in American theatre and compares the American genre to its British counterpart.

Many people are unaware of how influential Mormons have been on American popular culture. This book parts the curtain and looks behind the scenes at the little-known but important influence Mormons have had on popular culture in the United States and beyond. Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon provides an unprecedented, comprehensive treatment of Mormons and popular culture. Authored by a Mormon studies librarian and author of numerous writings regarding Mormon folklore, culture, and history, this book provides students, scholars, and interested readers with an introduction and wide-ranging overview of the topic that can serve as a key reference book on the topic. The work contains fascinating coverage on the most influential Mormon actors, musicians, fashion designers, writers, artists, media personalities, and athletes. Some topics—such as the Mormon influence at Disney, and how Mormon inventors have assisted in transforming American popular culture through the inventions of television, stereophonic sound, video games, and computer-generated animation—represent largely unknown information. The broad overview of Mormons and American popular culture offered can be used as a launching pad for further investigation; researchers will find the references within the book's well-documented chapters helpful.

In the nineteenth century, long before film and television brought us explosions, car chases, and narrow escapes, it was America's theaters that thrilled audiences, with “sensation scenes” of speeding trains, burning buildings, and endangered bodies, often in melodramas extolling the virtues of temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage. Amy E. Hughes scrutinizes these peculiar intersections of spectacle and reform, revealing the crucial role that spectacle has played in American activism and how it has remained central to the dramaturgy of reform. Hughes traces the cultural history of three famous sensation scenes—the drunkard with the delirium tremens, the fugitive slave escaping over a river, and the victim tied to the railroad tracks—assessing how these scenes conveyed, allayed, and denied concerns about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. These images also appeared in printed propaganda, suggesting that the coup de théâtre was an essential part of American reform culture. Additionally, Hughes argues that today’s producers and advertisers continue to exploit the affective dynamism of spectacle, reaching an even broader audience through film, television, and the Internet. To be attuned to the dynamics of spectacle, Hughes argues, is to understand how we see. Her book will interest not only theater historians, but also scholars and students of political, literary, and visual culture who are curious about how U.S. citizens saw themselves and their world during a pivotal period in American history.

Provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet.

New Theatre Quarterly provides a lively international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet, and where prevailing dramatic assumptions can be subjected to vigorous critical questioning. Articles in volume 74 include: Joan Littlewood's Key to Creativity: 'Go on Stage to Fail'; Grandfathers and Orphans: the Family Saga of European Theatre; Decoding Myths in the Nepalese Festival of Indra Jatra; Theatre in Education in Britain: Current Practice and Future Potential; From Object to Subject: the Israeli Theatre of the Battered Women; 'The Spirits Wouldn't Let Me Be Anything Else': Shamanic Dimensions in Theatre Practice Today; The Contaminated Audience: Researching Amateur Theatre in Wales before 1939.

No play in the history of the American Stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin . This book traces the major dramatizations of Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through modern versions on film. Frick introduce the reader to the artists who created the plays and productions that created theatre history.

Public Theatres and Theatre Publics presents sixteen focused investigations that connect theatre and performance studies with public sphere theory. The organizing critical lens of publics and publicness allows for the chapters to speak to one another other across time periods and geographies, inviting readers to think about how performing in public shapes and circulates concepts of identity, notions of taste or belonging, markers of class, and possibilities for political agency. Each essay presents a theorized case study that grapples with fundamental questions of how individuals perform in public contexts. The essays, written by a cross-section of prominent and emerging theatre and performance scholars, contribute new discussions and understandings of how theatre and performance work, as well as how publics, publicity, and modes of publicness have been constructed and contested over the last three centuries and in multiple national contexts including the US, Britain, France, Germany, Argentina and Egypt.