Living Anthologies: Authors' Carnivals in Nineteenth-Century America
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Abstract
Authors’ Carnivals were a kind of literary fair or spectacle, consisting of a number of various program points and performative elements. Their common feature was that they were all based on well-known literary texts, or related to the lives of famous authors. The most common feature was the so-called tableau vivant, i.e. the real-life recreation of a scene from a literary text. Being highly entertaining events the Authors’ Carnivals attracted many visitors and played a major role in the popular interpretation of national and foreign literature, as well as, the establishment of a national canon in the last three decades of the nineteenth century in the US. Today Authors’ Carnivals are a forgotten type of entertainment although they have many parallel structures with modern types of entertainments, e.g. cosplay or Comic Con. The aim of this dissertation, however, is not to show in how far Authors’ Carnivals are related to today’s entertainment or may even influenced them but rather to investigate the role the carnivals played during their own era. To provide the reader with elementary knowledge on the events’ structure a detailed description of the Authors’ Carnival in San Francisco in 1879 is given. San Francisco’s organizers took advantage of earlier Authors’ Carnivals undertaken in other cities of the US and made their carnival a paradigmatic event. Based on the description, the focus of the dissertation lies on the meaningful aspects of female agency and the consumption of literature in the late nineteenth century. With the organization of Authors’ Carnivals women of society were given the extraordinary opportunities to be active participants within a public realm where men and women worked together for a benevolent cause. Remarkably, women were the driving forces and female participation was not only accepted but also appreciated. Thus, through Authors’ Carnivals women actively introduced a new way of consuming literature in a morally accepted context outside privacy.