Description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"...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