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'A Very Good Act for an Unimportant Place': Animals, Ambivalence and Abuse in Big-Time Vaudeville"
- Author(s):
- Catherine Young (see profile)
- Date:
- 2015
- Group(s):
- GS Drama and Performance, LLC Late-19th- and Early-20th-Century American, TC Popular Culture
- Subject(s):
- United States, History, Culture--Study and teaching, Drama
- Item Type:
- Book chapter
- Tag(s):
- urbanism, animal studies, youth culture, circus, national identity, American history, Cultural studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6P884
- Abstract:
- At the height of their popularity, performing animals appeared in over half of all big-time vaudeville bills and were highly significant to its business model. They were booked to draw children and their mothers to matinee performances and, as consistent sources of novelty, to create crucial word-of-mouth interest in the bill’s weekly line-up. Vaudeville’s unique position as aspirationally middle-class, family-friendly and inexpensive theatrical entertainment in the heart of the city provided a forum for contemplating a diversity of domestic and wild animal bodies within an urban cultural context. With their fur, feathers and anthropomorphic antics, animal vaudevillians created ‘discourses of animality’ that mediated audience members’ own humanity and embodied a simultaneous ambivalence and nostalgia for nature in the increasingly urban and industrial United States.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Book chapter
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
- Share this:
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