Reading Macro and Micro Trends in Nineteenth-Century Theater History

2018 ◽  
pp. 82-102
Author(s):  
Blair Best ◽  
Madeleine G. Cella ◽  
Rati Choudhary ◽  
Kayla C. Coleman ◽  
Robert Davis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Network Visualization ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Theater History ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
New York University ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
American Theater

This essay co-authored by Robert Davis and his students in a theater class at New York University describes the interdependence of close and distant reading practices in their creation and analysis of a representative corpus of nineteenth-century drama. With irregular scholarly and theatrical attention given to nineteenth-century American theatre, the archive of plays and productions is frustratingly fragmented with few playbooks and only limited accounts of their staging. This chapter demonstrates how students used corpus linguistic and spatial analysis tools like Voyant, Antconc, and Tagxedo to recover a neglected century of American theater. Students found that the use of digital tools to perform text analysis, mapping, and network visualization sparked new scholarly ideas about nineteenth-century theatre.

scholarly journals Collections, Compilations, and Convolutes of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Fragments in North America before ca. 1900

Fragmentology ◽  
10.24446/dlll ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 73-139
Author(s):  
Scott Gwara
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
The United States ◽  
New York University ◽  
Historical Society ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
Private Collections ◽  
Public Exhibition

Using evidence drawn from S. de Ricci and W. J. Wilson’s Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada, American auction records, private library catalogues, public exhibition catalogues, and manuscript fragments surviving in American institutional libraries, this article documents nineteenth-century collections of medieval and Renaissance manuscript fragments in North America before ca. 1900. Surprisingly few fragments can be identified, and most of the private collections have disappeared. The manuscript constituents are found in multiple private libraries, two universities (New York University and Cornell University), and one Learned Society (Massachusetts Historical Society). The fragment collections reflect the collecting genres documented in England in the same period, including albums of discrete fragments, grangerized books, and individual miniatures or “cuttings” (sometimes framed). A distinction is drawn between undecorated text fragments and illuminated ones, explained by aesthetic and scholarly collecting motivations. An interest in text fragments, often from binding waste, can be documented from the 1880s.

Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. By David A. Crespy. New York: Back Stage Books, 2003; pp. 192; 32 illus. $19.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-351
Author(s):  
Christopher Olsen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Living Theatre ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Back Stage ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
American Theatre History

David Crespy's account of Off-Off Broadway's roots in New York City is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on this vibrant period in American theatre history. Many authors writing on this era have limited themselves to focusing on particular theatre groups, such as the Living Theatre, Café Cino, and the Open Theatre, or on the work of specific playwrights, such as Maria Irene Fornés, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee. More historical accounts are needed to examine a cross section of theatre practitioners in the context of the political and artistic movements of the 1960s. Crespy has managed to do this to some degree, and has even convinced the elusive Edward Albee to write a foreword.

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