Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama

Download or read book Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama written by Megan Sanborn Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-10 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, melodramas were spectacular entertainment for Americans. They were also a key forum in which elements of American culture were represented, contested, and inverted. This book focuses specifically on the construction of the Mormon villain as rapist, murderer, and Turk in anti-Mormon melodramas. These melodramas illustrated a particularly religious world-view that dominated American life and promoted the sexually conservative ideals of the cult of true womanhood. They also examined the limits of honorable violence, and suggested the whiteness of national ethnicity. In investigating the relationship between theatre, popular literature, political rhetoric, and religious fervor, Megan Sanborn Jones reveals how anti-Mormon melodramas created a space for audiences to imagine a unified American identity.