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Author Wilson Kimber, Marian, 1960- author.

Title The elocutionists : women, music, and the spoken word / Marian Wilson Kimber.

Publication Info. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2017]

Item Status

Location Call No. Status OPAC Message Public Note Gift Note
 Talbott: Circulating Collection  PN4145 .K56 2017    Available  ---
Description xvii, 324 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Series Music in American life
Music in American life.
Summary "Emerging in the 1850s, elocutionists recited poetry or drama with music to create a new type of performance. The genre--dominated by women--achieved remarkable popularity. Yet the elocutionists and their art fell into total obscurity during the twentieth century. Marian Wilson Kimber restores elocution with music to its rightful place in performance history. Gazing through the lenses of gender and genre, Wilson Kimber argues that these female artists transgressed the previous boundaries between private and public domains. Their performances advocated for female agency while also contributing to a new social construction of gender. Elocutionists, proud purveyors of wholesome entertainment, pointedly contrasted their "acceptable" feminine attributes against those of morally suspect actresses. As Wilson Kimber shows, their influence far outlived their heyday. Women, the primary composers of melodramatic compositions, did nothing less than create a tradition that helped shape the history of American music"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents The odyssey of a nice girl : elocution and women's cultural aspirations -- Making elocution musical : accompanied recitation and the musical voice -- Reading the fairies : Shakespeare in concert with Mendelssohn's A midsummer night's dream -- Sentimentality and gender in musically accompanied recitations -- Grecian urns in Iowa towns : Delsarte and The music man -- In another voice : women and dialect recitations -- Womanly women and moral uplift : female readers and concert companies on the Chautauqua circuit -- Multiplying voices : American women and the music of choral speaking -- Words and music ladies : the careers of Phyllis Fergus and Frieda Peycke -- Women's work, women's humor : musical recitations by female composers -- Afterword: Echoes of elocutionary arts -- Appendix.
Subject Oral interpretation.
Oral interpretation.
Elocutionists -- United States.
Elocutionists.
United States.
Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century.
Women and literature.
History.
Chronological Term 19th century
Subject Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century.
Chronological Term 20th century
Subject Women performance artists -- United States.
Music theater -- United States.
Readers' theater.
Women performance artists.
Choral speaking.
Music theater.
Oral reading.
Oral reading.
Readers' theater.
MUSIC -- History & Criticism.
Choral speaking.
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Women's Studies.
Chronological Term 1800-1999
Genre/Form History.
Other Form: Online version: Kimber, Marian Wilson, 1960- Elocutionists. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2017 9780252099151 (DLC) 2016041884
ISBN 9780252040719 (hardcover)
0252040716 (hardcover)
9780252082221 (paperback)
0252082222 (paperback)
9780252099151 (ebook)