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Title details for The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess by Ellen Noonan - Available

The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess

Race, Culture, and America's Most Famous Opera

by Ellen Noonan
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Created by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward and sung by generations of black performers, Porgy and Bess has been both embraced and reviled since its debut in 1935. In this comprehensive account, Ellen Noonan examines the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for equality. In its surprising endurance lies a myriad of local, national, and international stories.
For black performers and commentators, Porgy and Bess was a nexus for debates about cultural representation and racial uplift. White producers, critics, and even audiences spun revealing racial narratives around the show, initially in an attempt to demonstrate its authenticity and later to keep it from becoming discredited or irrelevant. Expertly weaving together the wide-ranging debates over the original novel, Porgy, and its adaptations on stage and film with a history of its intimate ties to Charleston, The Strange Career of “Porgy and Bess” uncovers the complexities behind one of our nation’s most long-lived cultural touchstones.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 10, 2012

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781469600253
      • File size: 4513 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781469600253
      • File size: 4513 KB

  • Accessibility

    The publisher provides the following statement about the accessibility of the EPUB file supplied to OverDrive. Experiences may vary across reading systems. After borrowing the book, you may download the EPUB files to read in another reading system.

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    • Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and font size, spaces between paragraphs, sentences, words, and letters, as well as color of background and text).

    • Not all of the content will be readable as read aloud speech or dynamic braille.

    Conformance

    • No information is available.

    Navigation

    • Table of contents to all chapters of the text via links.

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      February 1, 2013

      With treatments ranging from DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy to George Gershwin's 1935 operatic adaptation Porgy and Bess, the story of crippled beggar Porgy and his neighbors on Catfish Row has ignited many debates about racism and American history. Noonan's (public history, CUNY Grad Ctr.) well-researched examination of Porgy and Bess provides an abbreviated history of Charleston, SC, and places Gershwin's opera in historical, racial, and social contexts. Heyward has been criticized for attempting to write about the black experience as a white Southern man; while some consider the plot a distortion of Southern history and degrading to black Americans, the play and opera also provided new opportunities for black performers in a still segregated society. Noonan details the story's transformation from Heyward's novel to today's theater productions. VERDICT This captivating read is an important contribution to the scholarship surrounding Heyward's and Gershwin's work. Recommended to readers interested in American history and race relations.--Shannon Marie Robinson, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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