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| Publications of Michael F D'Alessandro :chronological alphabetical by type listing:%% @article{fds373754, Author = {D’Alessandro, M}, Title = {Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals}, Journal = {American Literary History}, Volume = {35}, Number = {2}, Pages = {715-743}, Publisher = {Oxford University Press (OUP)}, Year = {2023}, Month = {May}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad005}, Abstract = {<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Beginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing amateur theatricals and tableaux vivants based on their favorite books. Unexpected character combinations frequently appeared on the same stage. Shakespeare’s Falstaff stood beside Dickens’s Little Nell; Longfellow’s Hiawatha rubbed shoulders with Old Mother Goose. For attendees, these events offered peculiar thrills. Similar to today’s fan conventions and cosplay events, participants engaged their cherished texts anew through physical enactment. Meanwhile, spectators could witness the totality of their reading experiences within a single shared space. Amateur play suddenly brought so many literary works to three-dimensional life—and all at once.</jats:p> <jats:p>Despite their amusements, however, the carnivals also fell short of loftier goals. First, organizers sought to advance a definitive literary canon in America, but they only affirmed Eurocentric texts that no longer dominated the marketplace. Second, the events might have produced an innovative form of theater, yet clumsy staging and spectatorial disorientation stymied these efforts. Thus, the authors’ carnivals left behind not only a legacy of spectacular fandom but also one of squandered cultural potential.US authors’ carnivals finally demonstrate[d] both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination. . . . [D]espite their estimable amusements . . . the carnivals ultimately proved resistant to the literary and theatrical cultures they intended to bolster.</jats:p>}, Doi = {10.1093/alh/ajad005}, Key = {fds373754} } @article{fds366560, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {At-Home Humbugs: Freaks and Fakes in the Nineteenth-Century Parlor Museum}, Journal = {Theatre Survey}, Volume = {63}, Number = {1}, Pages = {3-33}, Publisher = {Cambridge University Press (CUP)}, Year = {2022}, Month = {January}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557421000557}, Abstract = {<jats:p>In April 1885, a <jats:italic>New York Herald</jats:italic> journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high. . . . His whole body is covered by a very thick growth of long, tow colored hair . . . and the peculiar formation of his head [is] very suggestive of the Russian dachshund.” At first, Jo-Jo appeared docile, but as the scientists prodded him more and more, he started “snarling, showing his three canine teeth” and asked his guardian if he could bite the inspectors. Jo-Jo was decidedly not a dog-boy, or not exactly. He was, in fact, a Russian teenager suffering from hypertrichosis, a condition causing excessive hair growth all over the body, including nearly every surface area of the face. Barnum had signed him to perform a year earlier, and the boy made quite an auspicious debut. However, Jo-Jo was simply the latest in a long line of supposed hybrid species and exotic curiosities that Barnum had been displaying since midcentury. The famed showman built his name in part by presenting human creation itself as a continual spectrum. Barnum's attractions ranged from live tigers and giraffes to enigmatic simian performers to wax statues of America's degraded lower classes. As much of a draw as he became, even Jo-Jo had to share a bill with Tattooed Hindoo Dwarfs, Hungarian Gypsies, Buddhist Priests, as well as a menagerie of animals including baby elephants, kangaroos, lions, and twenty-foot-long “great sinewy serpents.” But Jo-Jo's specific appeal was tied to his inexplicability. Even given the closer inspection of the dog-faced boy, “none of the physicians present would hazard an opinion as to his ancestry.”</jats:p>}, Doi = {10.1017/s0040557421000557}, Key = {fds366560} } @book{fds366561, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {Staged Readings Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75}, Pages = {300 pages}, Year = {2022}, ISBN = {9780472220588}, Abstract = {The book will be particularly appealing to those interested in histories of popular theater, literature and reading, social class, and mass culture.}, Key = {fds366561} } @article{fds373755, Author = {d'Alessandro, M}, Title = {"If Actresses Ever Are Themselves": Living Pictures, Dying Women, and British Class Pretensions in Alcott's Behind a Mask}, Journal = {ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture}, Volume = {68}, Number = {4}, Pages = {423-461}, Publisher = {Project MUSE}, Year = {2022}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/esq.2022.0013}, Doi = {10.1353/esq.2022.0013}, Key = {fds373755} } @article{fds366562, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {“Creole Drama (by Juliane Braun) and Provocative Eloquence (by Laura Mielke)”}, Journal = {American Literature}, Volume = {92}, Number = {3}, Pages = {589-591}, Publisher = {Duke University Press}, Year = {2020}, Month = {September}, Key = {fds366562} } @misc{fds346258, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {Stumbling Into Utopia}, Journal = {Duke Magazine}, Number = {Special 2019}, Year = {2019}, Month = {August}, Key = {fds346258} } @article{fds350516, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {“Storms! Shipwrecks! Massacres!: Playbill Puffery and Other Visual Collisions in Nineteenth-Century America.”}, Journal = {American Art}, Volume = {33}, Number = {3}, Pages = {94-113}, Publisher = {University of Chicago Press}, Year = {2019}, Key = {fds350516} } @article{fds327291, Author = {D'Alessandro, MF}, Title = {"George Lippard's 'Theatre of Hell': Apocalyptic Melodrama and Working-Class Spectatorship in the Quaker City."}, Journal = {The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists}, Volume = {5}, Number = {2}, Year = {2017}, Key = {fds327291} } @article{fds327292, Author = {D'Alessandro, M}, Title = {The Drunkard's Directions: Mapping Urban Space in the Antebellum Temperance Drama}, Journal = {The New England Quarterly}, Volume = {87}, Number = {2}, Pages = {252-291}, Publisher = {MIT Press - Journals}, Year = {2014}, Month = {June}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00369}, Abstract = {<jats:p> William H. Smith's The Drunkard (premiering in 1844) broke attendance records at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum and P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York. Portraying the ills of intemperance, the melodrama also foregrounded thrilling scenes of local urbanity to inspire middle-class tourists to navigate convoluted and potentially dangerous city streets. </jats:p>}, Doi = {10.1162/tneq_a_00369}, Key = {fds327292} } @article{fds327294, Author = {D’Alessandro, M}, Title = {The Mouth Trap: Orality and the Rabelaisian Grotesque in Norris’s McTeague}, Journal = {Studies in American Naturalism}, Volume = {9}, Number = {1}, Pages = {1-25}, Publisher = {Project MUSE}, Year = {2014}, Month = {June}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/san.2014.0001}, Doi = {10.1353/san.2014.0001}, Key = {fds327294} } @article{fds327293, Author = {D'Alessandro, MF}, Title = {Childless 'Fathers,' Native Sons: Performing the Indian in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses}, Journal = {Mississippi Quarterly}, Volume = {67}, Number = {3}, Pages = {375-375}, Publisher = {College of Arts and Sciences of Mississippi State University}, Year = {2014}, Key = {fds327293} } @article{fds327295, Author = {D'Alessandro, MF}, Title = {Shifting Perceptions, Precarious Perspectives in Two of O'Neill's Early Sea Plays}, Journal = {The Eugene O'Neill Review}, Volume = {27}, Pages = {21-21}, Year = {2007}, Key = {fds327295} } | |
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