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9780199751303

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<br> A thoroughly innovative new account of nineteenth-century U.S. theater culture that simultaneously revises our understanding of that old American Studies fetish, the 'frontier.' Surprising and engrossing. --Eric Lott, author of Love & Theft<br><p><br> Pioneer Performances treks through American culture at its most colorful and disquieting, from minstrel shows to melodramas and Buffalo Bill to George W. Bush. Rebhorn overturns our stereotypes about the frontier by proving that it was not a place but a performative practice that was constantly being contested on the stages of Boston, New York, and other cities. He thereby allows us to see the central role these frontier performances played in creating the fantasy about what it means to be an American. --David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the NewMiddle Class<p><br> Drawing on plays familiar and little-known from the nineteenth century, Pioneer Performances presents an original and persuasive

A thoroughly innovative new account of nineteenth-century U.S. theater culture that simultaneously revises our understanding of that old American Studies fetish, the 'frontier.' Surprising and engrossing. --Eric Lott, author of Love & Theft Pioneer Performances treks through American culture at its most colorful and disquieting, from minstrel shows to melodramas and Buffalo Bill to George W. Bush. Rebhorn overturns our stereotypes about the frontier by proving that it was not a place but a performative practice that was constantly being contested on the stages of Boston, New York, and other cities. He thereby allows us to see the central role these frontier performances played in creating the fantasy about what it means to be an American. --David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the NewMiddle Class Drawing on plays familiar and little-known from the nineteenth century, Pioneer Performances presents an original and persuasive argument about the performative nature of frontier drama and its lasting importance for American culture. --S. E. Wilmer, author of Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities A revisionist take on frontier theatre history, Pioneer Performances narrates some challenging case studies. Rebhorn usefully complicates our usual readings of Forrest's Metamora and early minstrelsy's investment in frontier mythology, for example. --Bruce McConachie, author of MelodramaticFormations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 Pioneer Performances offers an imaginative reinterpretation of performances that have reconfigured our notions of the frontier, ranging from the early nineteenth-century drama Metamora, to blackface minstrelsy, to the twenty-first century film Brokeback Mountain. Scholars of nineteenth-century theatre and culture will appreciate Rebhorn's contribution to the ongoing dialogue around this complex topic. --Heather S. Nathans, author of Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861 Has the potential to make readers rethink much of what they thought they knew about the nineteenth-century theater and points to the continued need for scholarship in this vein. --Great Plains Quarterly Among the most important projects of American studies scholarship are (1) the recovery and (2) the rereading of forgotten and elided texts, to help us better see those works; and (3) the historicizing and (4) the contextualizing of those texts, to help us better understand our national pasts and present. A book that produces exemplary versions of even two of these projects contributes a great deal to our collective narratives; a book that produces versions of three is rarer and more impressive still. Matthew Rebhorn's book entirely succeeds at the first three, and then adds a coda that more briefly but still compellingly addresses the fourth. -- ALH Online Review

Author Information

Matthew Rebhorn is Assistant Professor of English at James Madison University.

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