The Soul of Pleasure: Sentiment and Sensation in Nineteenth-Century American Mass Entertainment

by David Monod

Overview

Show business is today so essential to American culture it’s hard to imagine a time when it was marginal. But as David Monod demonstrates, the appetite for amusements outside the home was not "natural": it developed slowly over the course of the nineteenth century. The Soul of Pleasure offers a new interpretation of how the taste for entertainment was cultivated. Monod focuses on the shifting connection between the people who built successful popular entertainments and the public who consumed them. Show people discovered that they had to adapt entertainment to the moral outlook of Americans, which they did by appealing to sentiment.

The Soul of Pleasure explores several controversial forms of popular culture—minstrel acts, burlesques, and saloon variety shows—and places them in the context of changing values and perceptions. Far from challenging respectability, Monod argues that entertainments reflected and transformed the audience’s ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, sentimentality not only infused performance styles and the content of shows but also altered the expectations of the theatergoing public. Sentimental entertainment depended on sensational effects that produced surprise, horror, and even gales of laughter. After the Civil War the sensational charge became more important than the sentimental bond, and new forms of entertainment gained in popularity and provided the foundations for vaudeville, America’s first mass entertainment. Ultimately, it was American entertainment’s variety that would provide the true soul of pleasure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501702389
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/24/2016
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Monod is Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the author of Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945–1953 and Store Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890–1939.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Enter Sentimentality: The Origins of the Entertainment Revolution
2. Laugh and Grow Fat: Minstrelsy and Burlesque
3. Looking Through: Sentimental Aesthetics
4. The Democratization of Entertainment: The Concert Saloons
5. Any Dodge Is Fair to Raise a Good Sensation: The Danger and Promise
of Sensationalism
6. Art with the Effervescence of Ginger Beer: The Creation of Vaudeville
7. Spectacle and Nostalgia on the Road: Traveling Shows
Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Karen Ahlquist

The Soul of Pleasure's chronological breadth and cultural analysis recommend it highly. It helps undermine a reductionist highbrow/lowbrow understanding of nineteenth-century American society that valorizes working-class culture, disparages elites, and dispenses with 'middling sorts’ entirely. David Monod argues that what he calls a sentimental approach to the theater enabled a broad middle class to overcome moral and religious antitheatrical strictures and, over the course of the nineteenth century, fostered the establishment of a successful, commercial mass culture. To support multifaceted and original assertions, he juxtaposes a range of theatrical genres and styles seldom considered together. The Soul of Pleasure attests to the ability of cultural factors to further historical understanding on their own, rather than simply as reflections of economic or social life.

Editorial Reviews

"The Soul of Pleasure's chronological breadth and cultural analysis recommend it highly. It helps undermine a reductionist highbrow/lowbrow understanding of nineteenth-century American society that valorizes working-class culture, disparages elites, and dispenses with 'middling sorts’ entirely. David Monod argues that what he calls a sentimental approach to the theater enabled a broad middle class to overcome moral and religious antitheatrical strictures and, over the course of the nineteenth century, fostered the establishment of a successful, commercial mass culture. To support multifaceted and original assertions, he juxtaposes a range of theatrical genres and styles seldom considered together. The Soul of Pleasure attests to the ability of cultural factors to further historical understanding on their own, rather than simply as reflections of economic or social life."

Karen Ahlquist

"The Soul of Pleasure's chronological breadth and cultural analysis recommend it highly. It helps undermine a reductionist highbrow/lowbrow understanding of nineteenth-century American society that valorizes working-class culture, disparages elites, and dispenses with 'middling sorts’ entirely. David Monod argues that what he calls a sentimental approach to the theater enabled a broad middle class to overcome moral and religious antitheatrical strictures and, over the course of the nineteenth century, fostered the establishment of a successful, commercial mass culture. To support multifaceted and original assertions, he juxtaposes a range of theatrical genres and styles seldom considered together. The Soul of Pleasure attests to the ability of cultural factors to further historical understanding on their own, rather than simply as reflections of economic or social life."—Karen Ahlquist, The George Washington University, author of Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815–1860

From the Publisher