Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

by Alexander Nemerov

Overview

What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov’s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening’s performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251861
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/01/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	757,197
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Alexander Nemerov, Vincent Scully Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, is the author of Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, The Body of Raphael Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (both from UC Press), and Frederick Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This book is a tour de force, a remarkable journey through history and art. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice

Editorial Reviews

This book is a tour de force, a remarkable journey through history and art. . . . Highly recommended.

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