Bruce Mcconachie
Biographic Data
| ID | 1709035 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Mcconachie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcconachie |
| SIGNATURE | MCCONACHIE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pittsburgh |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Alternative Comedy: 1979 And the Reinvention of British Stand-Up
In the late 1970s, the alternative comedy scene exploded into life in Britain and completely changed the style, subject matter and politics of British stand-up. Contemporary critics talked about it as 'anti-matter comedy' that 'makes you laugh while actually rearranging large chunks of your brain'. This book draws on a wealth of archive material - including unpublished recordings of early performances - and new interviews with key figures such as…
The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science
The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science integrates key findings from the cognitive sciences (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary studies and relevant social sciences) with insights from theatre and performance studies. This rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field dynamically advances critical and theoretical knowledge, as well as driving innovation in practice. The anthology includes30 specially commis…
Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science
Evolution, Cognition, and Performance
Theatre Histories
An Evolutionary Perspective on Play, Performance, and Ritual
What can neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive linguistics tell us about the probable origins of play? What was the likely order of the emergence of play, performance, and ritual in evolutionary time? As new scientific discoveries challenge older traditions and truisms of scholarship in performance studies, these questions take on new urgency and reshape key definitions in the field
Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (review)
Reviewed by: Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense Bruce McConachie Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. By Tracy C. Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; pp. viii + 439. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. The end of the cold war brought the declassification of many secret government documents and, with it, histories that could not have been written before 1989. Several recent books have focused on the fear and in…
Critical Theory and Performance
Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies
This essay argues that theatre and performance scholars should use theories that can be scientifically validated whenever possible. Scientists cannot arrive at objective knowledge, but through the process of falsification they can narrow their range of possible interpretations to provide explanations that best suit the evidence and counter the arguments of others. The cognitive sciences are now providing falsifiable explanations for many theatre …
Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage
Wearing the Breeches focuses on American actresses who performed male roles in masculine attire on the nineteenthcentury stage. As Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix points out, the cultural construction of women as generally passive, sentimental, and pure encouraged playwrights and audiences to believe that women could “naturally” play melodramatic boys, spunky young men, and even dashing equestrians. Dozens of actresses performed such roles from 1800 to …
Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians
Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past? As performance historians, can we understand what Molière may have experienced during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators in New York may have enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the 1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing …
Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture
Journal Article Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. By William J. Mahar. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xxii, 444 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-252-02396-X. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-252-06696-0.) Get access Bruce McConachie Bruce McConachie University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of America…
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working-Class
International Theatre Festival: Kontakt '94
Marxism, Melodrama, and Theatre Historiography
Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870
The Dialectics of Melodrama
What do our amusements say about our culture? For decades only a handful of historians thought this a worthwhile question, pioneering figures like Constance Rourke, in her Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), or Foster Rhea Dulles, in his America Learns to Play (1940). In the 1950s leisure pursuits became the subject of sociological study, most artfully in Reuel Denny's The Astonished Muse (1957). Only since the 1960s and the flourishing of social …
The "Oriental" Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia
Early in the action of The King and I, Anna gives the King's children a lesson in geopolitics. Seeing an old map of Asia on the wall in which Siam occupies an area roughly the size of China, she rolls out her own visual aid to cover it. Anna's new map is a Mercator projection of the world with Siam reduced to dimensions drawn in London and surrounded by land masses colored to denote the encroachments of European imperial power. The children objec…
Avvakum
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870
Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance
New York Operagoing, 1825-50: Creating an Elite Social Ritual
guage to discuss the performance-the social functions of the occasion may even surpass the aesthetic ones in relative importance. In this regard anthropologist Abner Cohen notes that elites in democratic societies like the United States tend to objectify their standards of belonging in mysterious, non-utilitarian symbols and dramatic performances, making up what amounts to a of excellence.' By 1850 the New York elite had effectively elaborated th…
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980
This collection of essays defines and explores American theatres that consciously appealed primarily to workers. The scope of the book extends from the 1830s to the 1980s. Different authors focus on how various plays related to the audience as a class, the historically dynamic interaction between spectators and actors, and why certain plays gained popularity. The collection encompasses essays concerning New York theatre in the 1830s and 1840s, Pi…
Critical Theory and Performance
Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance
Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies
This essay argues that theatre and performance scholars should use theories that can be scientifically validated whenever possible. Scientists cannot arrive at objective knowledge, but through the process of falsification they can narrow their range of possible interpretations to provide explanations that best suit the evidence and counter the arguments of others. The cognitive sciences are now providing falsifiable explanations for many theatre …
The "Oriental" Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia
Early in the action of The King and I, Anna gives the King's children a lesson in geopolitics. Seeing an old map of Asia on the wall in which Siam occupies an area roughly the size of China, she rolls out her own visual aid to cover it. Anna's new map is a Mercator projection of the world with Siam reduced to dimensions drawn in London and surrounded by land masses colored to denote the encroachments of European imperial power. The children objec…
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980
Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980
This collection of essays defines and explores American theatres that consciously appealed primarily to workers. The scope of the book extends from the 1830s to the 1980s. Different authors focus on how various plays related to the audience as a class, the historically dynamic interaction between spectators and actors, and why certain plays gained popularity. The collection encompasses essays concerning New York theatre in the 1830s and 1840s, Pi…
Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History
While most contemporary theatre historians would probably agree with the thrust of Styan's comment, few of them pursue questions and work within methods which allow them to investigate the many ways in which theatrical performances function as social events. Aside from a handful of Marxists interested in issues of theatre history, most historians of the theatre are content to sketch in the social-cultural background of a theatrical period or even…
Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage
Wearing the Breeches focuses on American actresses who performed male roles in masculine attire on the nineteenthcentury stage. As Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix points out, the cultural construction of women as generally passive, sentimental, and pure encouraged playwrights and audiences to believe that women could “naturally” play melodramatic boys, spunky young men, and even dashing equestrians. Dozens of actresses performed such roles from 1800 to …
Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians
Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past? As performance historians, can we understand what Molière may have experienced during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators in New York may have enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the 1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing …
"H.J. Conway's Dramatization of "Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter
A recently discovered letter from playwright-adaptor H.J. Conway to Moses Kimball, manager of the Boston Museum, reveals new information on the most popular dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the antebellum era. This 1852 letter, one of many in an uncatalogued collection of Kimball's business correspondence at the Boston Athenaeum Library, details Conway's plans for adapting Mrs. H.B. Stowe's novel, published the same year, for production at K…
"H.J. Conway's Dramatization of "Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter
A recently discovered letter from playwright-adaptor H.J. Conway to Moses Kimball, manager of the Boston Museum, reveals new information on the most popular dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the antebellum era. This 1852 letter, one of many in an uncatalogued collection of Kimball's business correspondence at the Boston Athenaeum Library, details Conway's plans for adapting Mrs. H.B. Stowe's novel, published the same year, for production at K…
Towards a Postpositivist Theatre History
While most contemporary theatre historians would probably agree with the thrust of Styan's comment, few of them pursue questions and work within methods which allow them to investigate the many ways in which theatrical performances function as social events. Aside from a handful of Marxists interested in issues of theatre history, most historians of the theatre are content to sketch in the social-cultural background of a theatrical period or even…
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980
Stage Left: Canadian Workers Theatre, 1929-1940
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980
This collection of essays defines and explores American theatres that consciously appealed primarily to workers. The scope of the book extends from the 1830s to the 1980s. Different authors focus on how various plays related to the audience as a class, the historically dynamic interaction between spectators and actors, and why certain plays gained popularity. The collection encompasses essays concerning New York theatre in the 1830s and 1840s, Pi…
New York Operagoing, 1825-50: Creating an Elite Social Ritual
guage to discuss the performance-the social functions of the occasion may even surpass the aesthetic ones in relative importance. In this regard anthropologist Abner Cohen notes that elites in democratic societies like the United States tend to objectify their standards of belonging in mysterious, non-utilitarian symbols and dramatic performances, making up what amounts to a of excellence.' By 1850 the New York elite had effectively elaborated th…
Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre & Society, 1820-1870
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870
Marxism, Melodrama, and Theatre Historiography
Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790-1870
The Dialectics of Melodrama
What do our amusements say about our culture? For decades only a handful of historians thought this a worthwhile question, pioneering figures like Constance Rourke, in her Troupers of the Gold Coast (1928), or Foster Rhea Dulles, in his America Learns to Play (1940). In the 1950s leisure pursuits became the subject of sociological study, most artfully in Reuel Denny's The Astonished Muse (1957). Only since the 1960s and the flourishing of social …
The "Oriental" Musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the U.S. War in Southeast Asia
Early in the action of The King and I, Anna gives the King's children a lesson in geopolitics. Seeing an old map of Asia on the wall in which Siam occupies an area roughly the size of China, she rolls out her own visual aid to cover it. Anna's new map is a Mercator projection of the world with Siam reduced to dimensions drawn in London and surrounded by land masses colored to denote the encroachments of European imperial power. The children objec…
Avvakum
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870
International Theatre Festival: Kontakt '94
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working-Class
Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture
Journal Article Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture. By William J. Mahar. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xxii, 444 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-252-02396-X. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-252-06696-0.) Get access Bruce McConachie Bruce McConachie University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of America…
Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage
Wearing the Breeches focuses on American actresses who performed male roles in masculine attire on the nineteenthcentury stage. As Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix points out, the cultural construction of women as generally passive, sentimental, and pure encouraged playwrights and audiences to believe that women could “naturally” play melodramatic boys, spunky young men, and even dashing equestrians. Dozens of actresses performed such roles from 1800 to …
Doing Things with Image Schemas: The Cognitive Turn in Theatre Studies and the Problem of Experience for Historians
Can historians know and explain the experiences of people from the distant past? As performance historians, can we understand what Molière may have experienced during his wrangling with the bureaucrats of Louis XIV over the production of Tartuffe? Can we comprehend what working-class spectators in New York may have enjoyed while experiencing the performance of an apocalyptic melodrama in the 1840s? What Janet Achurch experienced while rehearsing …
Critical Theory and Performance
Falsifiable Theories for Theatre and Performance Studies
This essay argues that theatre and performance scholars should use theories that can be scientifically validated whenever possible. Scientists cannot arrive at objective knowledge, but through the process of falsification they can narrow their range of possible interpretations to provide explanations that best suit the evidence and counter the arguments of others. The cognitive sciences are now providing falsifiable explanations for many theatre …
Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (review)
Reviewed by: Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense Bruce McConachie Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. By Tracy C. Davis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; pp. viii + 439. $89.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. The end of the cold war brought the declassification of many secret government documents and, with it, histories that could not have been written before 1989. Several recent books have focused on the fear and in…
An Evolutionary Perspective on Play, Performance, and Ritual
What can neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive linguistics tell us about the probable origins of play? What was the likely order of the emergence of play, performance, and ritual in evolutionary time? As new scientific discoveries challenge older traditions and truisms of scholarship in performance studies, these questions take on new urgency and reshape key definitions in the field
Theatre Histories
Art (21 works) · History (16 works) · Theater, Performance, and Music History (14 works) · History (11 works) · Visual arts (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (9 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (6 works)