The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage by Alan L. Ackerman, Jr (review)

430 letters in canada 1999 Victorian Sexual Dissidence solidifies Dellamora's reputation as a leader in the field of Victorian gender studies as well as a facilitator of such studies by others. And if my experience is anything to go by, this book should be in demand B no sooner did my review copy appear on my desk than two colleagues asked to borrow it. I had a hard time keeping it my office long enough to write the review. (LISA SURRIDGE) Alan L. Ackerman, Jr. The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage Johns Hopkins University Press. xx, 272. US $45.00 Given the indisputable importance of the theatre to so many nineteenthcentury novelists and poets, it is strange that we have not had a book like this before. One reason, perhaps, is that the subject of the relations between American literature and theatre is dauntingly large. Ackerman's book wisely does not pretend to encompass that complex history, but instead supplies a critical frame for thinking about literature and theatre. The book therefore goes well beyond the simple chronologies of so much theatre history and provides instead a set of theoretically astute and critically insightful analyses. It stands as an excellent and much-needed foray into its topic, and undoubtedly will serve as a basis for subsequent studies.`The portable theater' is a phrase used by William Dean Howells to describe the novel. Meant to characterize novels as dramas one can personally carry around B and read, at will, on the train, in a nook B the term aptly crystallizes Ackerman's interest in the tension between privately reading a book and publicly witnessing a theatrical performance. He sees nineteenth-century authors as preoccupied with associated oppositions B between the private and the public more generally, and between literature and theatre, and inner experience and outwardly expressive form. The book builds admirably on scholarship that attends to the social, cultural, and literary manifestations of these deeply felt oppositions B for example, work by Richard Sennett and Peter Brooks, Karen Halttunen, Jean-Christophe Agnew, Michael Fried, Lawrence Levine, and others. And Ackerman effectively uses the particulars of theatre history to make his argument, most especially reading his selected authors against the shift in nineteenth-century theatre from melodrama, with its hyperbolic and theatrical modes of expression, to realism, with its focus on understated and quiet expression, and its newly darkened theatres, which enabled the illusion of eavesdropping on private moments and interior states. Concerned primarily with the ways that representations of the theatre, ideas about theatricality, and conceptions of the public and private intersect in nineteenth-century American literature, the book also attends to dramaturgical idioms and strategies, and theatrical metaphors and humanities 431 references, in the selected works. And inasmuch as these writers imagine their social and national scenes in theatrical terms, Ackerman considers larger social and cultural contexts too. We learn about the ways Whitman's poetry and poetic theory interweave with conceptions of voice in oratory, opera, and melodrama. The chapter on Melville cogently situates his fictions, with their ambivalences about democracy and gentility, against the meanings of the Astor Place riot, with its stark contrast between the democratic followers of Edwin Forrest and the cultured elite that supported William Charles Macready. Howells's plays set in railroad parlour cars B odd public-private enclosures, where private experience is injected into public space B are shrewdly discussed in connection with a realist theatre that was becoming a private experience in a public place. Louisa May Alcott is intriguingly treated as an author who innovatively reimagined the domestic sphere in theatrical terms, just as the middle class generally was coming to see its private life as imbued with theatricality. And Henry James, in a suitably complicated way, is shown to intertwine his ambivalences about inner experience and outwardly expressive form, and personal freedom and rigid expressive convention, with his ambivalences about melodrama and realism, and theatre and the novel. Along the way we learn much else B about performance and spectatorship , the expressiveness of bodies and language, questions of gender, distinctions of class and ethnicity. But these matters are folded into the central concerns about...