Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage
ISBN: 9780190653705
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Literary Studies (1500 to 1800) Literary Studies (American) Literary Studies (19th Century);

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.


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

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