Publisher's Synopsis
The stage was a vital force in nineteenth-century American especially in the debates over slavery and race. This original Toby anthology brings together for the first time, 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 M,C. Brown's 1894 The Landlords Revenge; or Uncle Tom up to Date; from Lydia Maria Child's ardently abolitionist The Stars and Stripes to George Aiken's blatantly opportunistic Uncle Tom's Cabin, 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. It also offers important but hard-to-find plays - some of which appear here for the first time since their initial publication: early abolitionist plays like The Kidnapped clergy-man and The Fugitives, Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Christian Slave (her only dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin), Mrs. J.C. Swayze's Ossawattomie Brown, and Pauline Hopkins's Peculiar Sam; or The Underground Railroad.;And it places these texts in dialogue with popular plays that feature slavery like Anna Mowatt's Fashion and Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon,
