The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750-1990

ISBN-13: 9780521664837 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 468 str.

Richard Butsch

Opis

In The Making of American Audiences, Richard Butsch provides a comprehensive survey of American entertainment audiences from the Colonial period to the present. Providing coverage of theater, opera, vaudeville, minstrelsy, movies, radio and television, he examines the evolution of audience practices as each genre supplanted another as the primary popular entertainment. Based on original historical research, this volume exposes how audiences made themselves through their practices--how they asserted control over their own entertainments and their own behavior.

Recenzje

'This fascinating book is also an impressive piece of scholarship.' Ethics, Place and Environment

Spis treści

Acknowledgements; Introduction: participative public, passive private?; 1. Colonial theater, privileged audiences; 2. Drama in early Republican audiences; 3. The B'hoys in Jacksonian theaters; 4. Knowledge and the decline of audience sovereignty; 5. Matinee ladies: re-gendering theater audiences; 6. Blackface, whiteface; 7. Variety, liquor and lust; 8. Vaudeville, incorporated; 9. 'Legitimate' and 'illegitimate' theater around the turn of the century; 10. The celluloid stage: Nickelodeon audiences; 11. Storefronts to theaters: seeking the middle class; 12. Voices from the ether: early radio listening; 13. Radio cabinets and network chains; 14. Rural radio: 'we are seldom lonely anymore'; 15. Fears and dreams: public discourses about radio; 16. The electronic cyclops: fifties television; 17. A TV in every home: television 'effects'; 18. Home video: viewer autonomy?; 19. Conclusion: from effects to resistance and beyond; Appendix: availability, affordability, admission price; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.