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

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

About the author

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

Summary

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

Foreword

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title (2018)

Additional text

...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.

Product details

• Authors: Sarah E. Chinn, Sarah E. (Associate Professor of English Chinn, Chinn Sarah E.
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.05.2017
• EAN: 9780190653675
• ISBN: 978-0-19-065367-5
• No. of pages: 264
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / American / Regional, Theatre Studies, United States of America, USA, Literary studies: general, Literary theory, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Specific wars and campaigns, Gender studies: men and boys, Early modern warfare (including gunpowder warfare), Gender Studies: Men, American War of Independence, c 1765 to 1783 (American Revolutionary period)