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Sovereign pleasures: comic play in antebellum America
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Banta, Emily Margaret. Sovereign pleasures: comic play in antebellum America. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-t6ya-wc41

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TitleSovereign pleasures: comic play in antebellum America
NameBanta, Emily Margaret (author); McGill, Meredith (chair); Jones, Douglas A (member); Diamond, Elin (member); Dillon, Elizabeth (member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-10 (degree)
SubjectAmerican literature, Performing arts, American studies, American drama (Comedy) -- 19th century -- History and criticism, Comic, The, in literature, Democracy -- United States, American, Comedy, Democratic, Performance, Public, Theater
Extent1 online resource (viii, 263 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionSovereign Pleasures argues that comic performance was central to the imperfectly democratizing public formations of the early United States. In a period when democratic culture was defined less by the promise of expanding suffrage than it was by the politics of popular assembly, an evolving panoply of comic amusement fostered various kinds of public gathering in which competing formulations of the sovereignty of “the people” could find momentary and provisional articulation. While early American literary studies has increasingly turned to the long-neglected materials of theater and performance to expand critical approaches to the democratic public sphere, such scholarship seldom recognizes the laughter that so often propels public assembly and breathes life into popular culture. Beyond simply insisting that we take antebellum theater and performance cultures seriously, my dissertation asks what can be gained by attending to the pleasures of their unserious enterprises. At playhouses and pleasure-gardens, at lyceums and museums, in taprooms and dance halls, at the marketplace and in the streets, publics gathered in the pursuit of fun and enjoyment, embodying a popular culture that imagined itself (with no small measure of ambivalence) to be democratic. Sovereign Pleasures delineates these ludic pursuits and the fraught, dissonant forms of collective feeling they engendered. Individual chapters feature Washington Irving theorizing the comic sociality of early national democracy from the pit of a riotous playhouse; star comedians Thomas Wignell, Sol Smith, and Anna Cora Mowatt appealing to the sovereignty of their local audiences with winking forms of ironized address; virtuoso dancer William Henry Lane, the first widely successful African American minstrel player on the commercial stage, contending with the racist structures of blackface comedy; and Henry “Box” Brown resurrecting the politics of the antebellum carnivalesque with his abolitionist theatrics. Engaging with scholarship on early American performance culture, critical studies of the democratic public sphere, and theories of comedy and play, I chart a cultural history of pleasure that enriches our understanding of the shape and limits of early U.S. democracy.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-t6ya-wc41
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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