Faye Dudden | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Faye Dudden | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860. By Rosemarie K. Bank. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xii, 292 pp. $69.95, ISBN 0-521-56387-9.)

Rosemarie K. Bank's Theatre Culture in America is concerned not just with antebellum theater but with antebellum culture in general. Bank argues that we should see all of antebellum culture as a form of theater in the sense that it was not a fixed entity but rather a performative process, and as such it was diverse, contradictory, provisional, and always escaping the rigid formulations or unitary "myths" that scholars may seek to impose. For Bank, seeing antebellum culture as theatrical means understanding that "performances are deceptive as well as authentic and always (already) occur in contested and contradictory terrain." . . .

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