Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607–1789

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Synopsis
The early settlers in America had a special relationship to the theater. Though largely without a theater of their own, they developed an ideology of theater that expressed their sense of history, as well as their version of life in the New World. Theater Enough provides an innovative analysis of early American culture by examining the rhetorical shaping of the experience of settlement in the new land through the metaphor of theater.The rhetoric, or discourse, of early American theater emerged out of the figures of speech that permeated the colonists' lives and literary productions. Jeffrey H. Richards examines a variety of texts--histories, diaries, letters, journals, poems, sermons, political tracts, trial transcripts, orations, and plays--and looks at the writings of such authors as John Winthrop and Mercy Otis Warren. Richards places the American usage of theatrum mundi--the world depicted as a stage--in the context of classical and Renaissance traditions, but shows how the trope functions in American rhetoric as a register for religious, political, and historical attitudes.
Copyright:
1991

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:
9780822378228
Related ISBNs:
9780822311072
Publisher:
Duke University Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Duke University Press
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Literature and Fiction, Drama, Plays and Theater, Language Arts
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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