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Publication Review of "Nine Plays of Early America, 1765-1818" Edited by Sarah E. Chinn and Richard S. Pressman(University of North Carolina Press, 2019-10-01) Mielke, Laura L.Publication Patriot, Satirist, Bagman: Picturing John Brougham’s Columbus Burlesque(New England Theatre Conference, 2021-12-31) Mielke, Laura L.In another of his burlesques, Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or, The Gentle Savage (1855), which engages the romantic myths of the seventeenth-century Jamestown colony, Brougham performed as John Smith, who is appropriately described as (among other things) a "Statesman, Pioneer, and Bagman," accompanied by "a crew of Fillibusters [sic]," or soldiers of fortune seeking to establish political power in a sovereign nation.10 Certainly, Brougham's Columbus fits the same description, and Brougham prompts laughter through the idea that the revered explorer was also a conman, racketeer, and filibuster who bears little or no resemblance to figure enshrined in American myth. Amy E. Hughes encourages scholars of nineteenth-century theater to look not only to dramatic texts but also to records of actual performances, such as "playbills, newspaper advertisements, and cast books," taking up "quirky remnants in tandem with other sources" to "gain a more nuanced understanding of the content and craft of theatermaking during the 1800s. With the recognition that even more work needs to be done on Brougham's use of music (especially his parody of popular tunes and deployment of patriotic sing-alongs), I bring new focus here on scraps of the visual culture informing the text and the staging of Columbus, hoping to bring us one step closer to the richness Brougham's art and at the same time trouble any conclusions regarding the politics of his art. By the time his performance career ended in 1879, Brougham had "played at least 477 roles in at least 443 different plays" in theatres across the country, penned no fewer than 160 theatrical scripts, and published at least thirty-five dramas with Samuel French, in addition to multiple collections of short fiction and poetry.14 As Marc Robinson has it, "For every form the American theater puts forward-heroic tragedy, romance, history play, melodrama-Brougham counters with plays less poised, less linear, less respectful of polarities of good and evil.Publication Review of "Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century" edited by Angela Ray and Paul Stob(Michigan State University Press, 2021-12-31) Mielke, Laura L.Publication Review of "Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery" by Peter Wirzbicki(Oxford University Press, 2022-11-08) Mielke, Laura L.Publication “This Sea of Upturned Faces”: The Rhetorical Role of Audience in Frederick Douglass’s Constitutional Interpretation at Midcentury(Oxford University Press, 2024-03-18) Mielke, Laura L.Laura L Mielke, “This Sea of Upturned Faces”: The Rhetorical Role of Audience in Frederick Douglass’s Constitutional Interpretation at Midcentury, MELUS, Volume 49, Issue 1, Spring 2024, Pages 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlae009Publication Review of "Literary Indians: Aesthetics & Encounter in American Literature to 1920" by Angela Calcaterra(Oxford University Press, 2020-06-01) Mielke, Laura L.Publication Introduction(University of Nebraska Press, 2012-01) Mielke, Laura L.Publication John Brougham’s Columbus Burlesque(Association for Documentary Editing, 2022-04-11) Mielke, Laura L.; Brown, Rachel LinneaPublication Review of "Publishing Scholarly Editing: Archives, Computing, and Experience" by Christopher Ohge(Association for Documentary Editing, 2023-04-27) Mielke, Laura L.Publication Review of Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists by Emily Ruth Rutter(Sport Literature Association, 2022-03-31) Wedge, PhilipPublication An Introduction to Plautus Through Scenes: Selected and Translated by Richard F. Hardin(Poetry in Translation, 2021-08-01) Plautus, Titus Maccius; Hardin, Richard F.This collection celebrates a comic artist who left twenty plays written during the decades on either side of 200 B.C. He spun his work from Greek comedies, “New Comedies” bearing his own unique stamp. In Rome the forerunners of such plays, existing a generation before Plautus, were called fabulae palliatae, comedies in which actors wore the Greek pallium or cloak. These first situation comedies, Greek then Roman, were called New Comedies, in contrast with the more loosely plotted Old Comedies, surviving in the plays of Aristophanes. The jokes, characters, and plots that Plautus and his successor Terence left have continued to influence comedy from the Renaissance even to the present. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest are partly based on Menaechmi, Amphitruo, Mostellaria, Casina, and Rudens; Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser), on Aulularia; Gelbart and Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, on Pseudolus, Miles Gloriosus, Casina, and Mostellaria; David Williamson’s Flatfoot (2004) on Miles Gloriosus; the Capitano in Commedia dell’Arte, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, and Jonson’s Bobadill all inherit traits of Plautus’s braggart soldiers. I have assembled this collection of scenes with several audiences in mind, besides, of course, readers who like to laugh. First, those (like me) also interested in the classical tradition, comedy above all, and its history. Then I hope to interest people who like doing comedy as well as reading it, feeling the threads tying ancient to modern comic plots and characters. Most or all of these scenes are suitable to use for audition or separate performance. Readers or actors may, I hope, go on to read or see or produce complete plays by Plautus. Which ones to choose? They could do worse than turn to the ones that led Shakespeare, Molière, and Sondheim to write their imitations.Publication Review of Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White by Arsene Wenger(Sport Literature Association, 2021-04-04) Wedge, PhilipPublication The Made Man and the “Minor” Novel: Erewhon, ANT, and Empire(Indiana University Press, 2017-10-01) Neill, AnnaBruno Latour has identified the “great novel” as a site for revealing the complex nature of agency in the Anthropocene. As it traces cause and effect through numerous, interrelated events, the “great novel” reveals a vast network of actors—entities, human and non-human—that are neither pure subjects nor pure objects. I examine firstly how novels by Charles Dickens and George Eliot depict the agency of non-human things within a network of actors. I then discuss how a self-proclaimed “minor” novel, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), challenges us to think about the colonial implications of the distributed, networked agency represented in “great” Victorian fiction. Erewhon shows how the imbrication of the human and the (in particular) non-human machinate underpins the entrepreneurial success of the colonial adventurer.Publication Review of David Block, Pastime Lost: The Humble, Original, and Now Completely Forgotten Game of English Baseball(Sport Literature Association, 2019-09-15) Wedge, PhilipPublication Provocative Eloquence: Theater, Violence, and Antislavery Speech in the Antebellum United States(University of Michigan Press, 2019) Mielke, Laura L.In the mid-19th century, rhetoric surrounding slavery was permeated by violence. Slavery’s defenders often used brute force to suppress opponents, and even those abolitionists dedicated to pacifism drew upon visions of widespread destruction. Provocative Eloquence recounts how the theater, long an arena for heightened eloquence and physical contest, proved terribly relevant in the lead up to the Civil War. As anti-slavery speech and open conflict intertwined, the nation became a stage. The book brings together notions of intertextuality and interperformativity to understand how the confluence of oratorical and theatrical practices in the antebellum period reflected the conflict over slavery and deeply influenced the language that barely contained that conflict. The book draws on a wide range of work in performance studies, theater history, black performance theory, oratorical studies, and literature and law to provide a new narrative of the interaction of oratorical, theatrical, and literary histories of the nineteenth-century U.S.Publication Review of Will Bishop, Pinstripe Nation: The New York Yankees in American Culture(Sport Literature Association, 2019-03) Wedge, PhilipPublication Native American Presence(Cambridge University Press, 2018-11) Mielke, Laura L.In this contribution to the Hawthorne in Context volume, Laura Mielke considers the appearance of Native American characters and cultures across Hawthorne’s tales and novels. In particular, she traces how his use of autochthonous legend, progression through social stages, warfare, captivity, conversion, and masquerade all point to the history of colonialism and the implementation of federal Indian removal policy at the highpoint of his writing career. Though Hawthorne expressed antipathy concerning the use of indigenous materials in contemporary literature, he simply could not write Native Americans out of historic or contemporary existence.Publication Fall Ball at Lyons Park(2018) Wedge, PhilipPublication Interview with Elizabeth Schultz Focused on Her Teaching and Experiences at the University of Kansas (1967-2001) and Beyond(Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas, 2018-12) Schultz, Elizabeth A.; Fentress, BethDr. Elizabeth Schultz talks about her academic work, post-academic writings, and experiences both abroad and at the University of Kansas. Her stories of life studying and teaching topics like Melville, English, and history are enriched by discussions of even deeper topics like compassion, loss, and creativity.Publication Epigenetic emergence: reading for growth in Jane Eyre(Taylor & Francis, 2017-12-21) Neill, AnnaThe potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has been a topic of recent inquiry from several directions. However, these approaches sometimes too easily align epigenetics with the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which presumes the direct influence of environment on the existence of particular traits across generations. This emphasis on environment in turn looks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science that attributed degrees of civilisation or savagery to the combined influence of heredity and climate. By instead tracing epigenetics in the older concept of ‘epigenesis’ from Romantic biology, we can identify the interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and in the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.