Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I The Blind Ruck of Event
- 1 Violent Identifications
- 2 Reading, Sociability, and Warfare
- 3 Reconstructing the Civil War Literature of Injury, Illness, and Convalescence
- 4 “The Home and the Camp So Inseparable”
- 5 The Confederacy and Other Southern Fictions
- 6 The Civil War Ballad and Its Reconstruction
- 7 The Unfinished Drama of the American Civil War
- 8 Walt Whitman and the Reconstructive Impulse of Leaves of Grass
- 9 Reconsidering Moses
- 10 From “Facts” to “Pictures”
- Part II Worlds Made and Remade
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
7 - The Unfinished Drama of the American Civil War
from Part I - The Blind Ruck of Event
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I The Blind Ruck of Event
- 1 Violent Identifications
- 2 Reading, Sociability, and Warfare
- 3 Reconstructing the Civil War Literature of Injury, Illness, and Convalescence
- 4 “The Home and the Camp So Inseparable”
- 5 The Confederacy and Other Southern Fictions
- 6 The Civil War Ballad and Its Reconstruction
- 7 The Unfinished Drama of the American Civil War
- 8 Walt Whitman and the Reconstructive Impulse of Leaves of Grass
- 9 Reconsidering Moses
- 10 From “Facts” to “Pictures”
- Part II Worlds Made and Remade
- Suggestions for Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
If there was no Civil War drama written during the conflict, there was an active theater culture thriving before, during, and after the war, one represented most clearly in American melodrama. Tracing the particular genealogy of racial melodrama from before the Civil War to the beginnings of Black Lives Matter, this chapter discovers the way in which playwrights have deployed and manipulated melodrama’s black-or-white aesthetic mode both to retrench and to reimagine Black and white racial relations. From sensational melodramas before the war, through conservative ones after it, to radical ones today, racial melodrama has a long genealogy. Recovering this genealogy allows us to witness how the American theater played a crucial role in not only staging this country’s fraught racial relations for audiences, but also inviting these audiences—from the nineteenth century to today—to think and feel differently about the unfinished racial drama of the American Civil War.
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Civil War and Reconstruction , pp. 103 - 117Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022