Access Type

Online access to this book is only available to eligible users.

Download

Download Full Text (11.4 MB)

Description

This study affords an entirely new view of the nature of modern popular entertainment. American vaudeville is here regarded as the carefully elaborated ritual serving the different and paradoxical myth of the new urban folk. It demonstrates that the compulsive myth-making faculty in man is not limited to primitive ethnic groups or to serious art, that vaudeville cannot be dismissed as meaningless and irrelevant simply because it fits neither the criteria of formal criticism or the familiar patterns of anthropological study.

Using the methods for criticism developed by Susanne K. Langer and others, the author evaluates American vaudeville as a symbolic manifestation of basic values shared by the American people during the period 1885-1930. By examining vaudeville as folk ritual, the book reveals the unconscious symbolism basic to vaudeville-in its humor, magic, animal acts, music, and playlets, and also in the performers and the managers—which gave form to the dominant American myth of success. This striking view of the new mass man as a folk and of his mythology rooted in the very empirical science devoted to dispelling myth has implications for the serious study of all forms of mass entertainment in America. The book is illustrated with a number of striking photographs.

Albert F. McLean is associate professor of English at Transylvania University.

Publication Date

1965

Publisher

The University Press of Kentucky

Place of Publication

Lexington, KY

ISBN

9780813134291

eISBN

9780813150741

Keywords

Vaudeville, American vaudeville, Folk ritual

Disciplines

Theatre History

American Vaudeville as Ritual
Read Sample Off-campus Download for UK only

Consortium members may access while on their campus.

Share

COinS