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Description of  American Vaudeville (In Place)

1952271061 pdf A dreamlike, evocative reckoning with a lost epoch in popular cultureand with old, weird America. At the heart of American Vaudeville is one strange, unsettling fact: for nearly fifty years, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, vaudeville was everywherethen, suddenly, it was nowhere. This book tells the story of what was once the most popular form of entertainment in the country using lists, creation myths, thumbnail biographies, dreams, and obituaries. A lyric historypart social history, part songAmerican Vaudeville sits at the nexus between poetry, experimental nonfiction, and, because it includes historic images, art books. Geoffrey Hilsabecks book grows out of extensive archival research. Rather than arranging that researchthe remains of vaudevilleinto a realistic picture or tidy narrative, Hilsabeck dreams vaudeville back into existence, drawing on photographs, letters, joke books, reviews, newspaper stories, anecdotes, and other material gathered from numerous archives, as well as from memoirs by vaudeville performers like Buster Keaton, Eva Tanguay, and Eddie Cantor. Some of this research is presented as-is, a letter from a now forgotten vaudeville performer to her booking agent, for example some is worked up into brief scenes and biographies and some is put to even more imaginative uses, finding new life in dialogues and prose poems. Read more