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The stage was a vital force in nineteenth-century America-especially in the debates over slavery and race. For the first time, this Toby anthology brings together a selection of plays that shaped the ways in which the drama of slavery was performed in the American theatre. From Susanna Rowson's 1794 Slaves in Algiers to Pauline Hopkins's 1879 Peculiar Sam; or The Underground Railroad; from George Aiken's blatantly opportunistic version of Uncle Tom's Cabin to Harriet Beecher Stowe's own The Christian Slave (her only dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin) and Lydia Maria Child's ardently abolitionist The Stars and Stripes, and from former slave William Wells Brown's The Escape to racist, pro-slavery minstrel texts, this anthology allows readers to see how Americans from diverse backgrounds and standpoints staged slavery. In so doing, it also places important but hard-to-find texts like The Fugitives and excerpts from The Kidnapped Clergyman (two of the earliest abolitionist plays) in dialogue with popular drama like Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon.
Eric Gardner's opening essay and his introductions to the individual plays offer a rich sense of the historical, biographical, socio-political, and literary contexts surrounding the drama of slavery in America.
About the Editor
DR. ERIC GARDNER teaches a wide range of courses focusing on American literature culture and writing studies at Saginaw Valley State University. Currently at work on a biography of Lucy Ann Delaney, Gardner has written articles on African American literature and culture for journals like the New England Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Prose, and the African American Review, as well as reference book entries for sources like the American National Biography Online, the Encyclopedia of African American Literature, and African American Lives. His work on writing studies has appeared in journals like the Writing Lab Newsletter and WPA:
Writing Program Administration, and his poetry in journals like Barnwood and the Pikeville Review.
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