Theatre and the Macabre

Meredith Conti is Associate Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and a historian of nineteenth-century performance and popular culture in the United States and Britain. She is the author of Playing Sick: Performances of Illness in the Age of Victorian Medicine (2018) and of published essays exploring the intersections of theatre and medicine, gender and race in the Victorian period, and gun violence in theatre.Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. is Professor of Theatre and director of the MFA program at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author, editor and co-editor of over two dozen books, including Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (2012), Eaters of the Dead: A Cultural History of Cannibal Monsters (2021), the Bram Stoker Award-nominated The Streaming of Hill House (2020), and numerous articles on horror theatre.

Theatre and the Macabre is a must-read book for academics, history buffs, theatre professionals and students of the macabre. The range of subjects covered and depths to which they are explored, literally from head to footlights, make this book an invaluable addition to any library.

• Acknowledgements ContributorsIntroduction: I Made the Dance of Death - Meredith Conti Part I. Histories of the Macabre The Mortification of Harvey Leach: Humour and Horror in Nineteenth-Century Theatre of Disability - Michael M. ChemersThe Horrors of the Great War on the London Stage: The Grand Guignol Season of 1915 - Helen E.M. BrooksPhantoms of the Stage: The History and Practice of Uncanny Apparitions - Richard J. HandPart II. Dramaturgies of the Macabre Time and Punishment: Gothic Maternal Bodies on the Contemporary British Stage - Kelly JonesThe Body Dismembered: Allegory and Modernity in German Trauerspiel - Magda Romanska Macabre Children on the Australian Stage: Angela Betzien's Cycle of Crime Plays - Chris Hay and Stephen Carleton Martin McDonagh's Hangmen: Justice and Guilt in Public and Private Acts of Hanging - Michelle C. PaullFear of Death and Lyrical Flight: Mortality Salience Mediation in Fun Home - Christopher J. StaleyPart III. Staging the Macabre The Severed Head on Stage - Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.Dancing Haunted Legacies: Diana Szeinblum's Alaska- Jeanmarie Higgins'To Die Over and Over Inside My Body': Three Deaths in Hijikata Tatsumi's Butoh - J. E. F. OoiPart IV. The Immersive Macabre 'Black and Deep Desires': Sleep No More and the Immersive Macabre - Dan VenningThe Dark Ride Immersive and the Danse Macabre - David BisahaLiveness and Aliveness: Chasing the Uncanny in the Contemporary Haunt Industry - David NorrisAmerican Hells: Hell Houses, Abortion Frames, and Unsexed Women - Robyn Lee HornHaunting the Stage: Macabre Tourism, Lieux de Memoire, and the Immortal Death of Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre - Meredith Conti Bibliography Index