Major voices

"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." "Dr. Eric Gardner's opening essay and his introductions to the individual plays offer a sense of the historical, biographical, socio-political, and literary contexts surrounding the drama of slavery in America."--Jacket.