Commerce and Carnival at the Canvas City

Offering an exploration of how one of the most popular and spectacular forms of postbellum entertainment was represented in the period's fiction, this chapter considers the way the circus became both a recognisably modern form of commercial business as well as a site of exotic and sensual escape. The arrival of a travelling circus in town is a frequent episode in postbellum rural fiction, and this chapter considers the complex and often contradictory narrative implications of such an episode—representing the presence of a modern capitalist economy and a disruption to everyday life, the circus also embodies and enacts many of the complex sensual, social and psychological connotations of urban modernity. Amongst others, the chapter examines the place of the circus in rural fictions by Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland, Booth Tarkington, and Alice Brown.

Art · Computer graphics (images) · Visual arts · Computer Science · Philippine History and Culture