Description
Book SynopsisHonorable Mention, Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theater Research
Explores the intersection and history of American literary realism and the performance of spiritual and racial embodiment.
Recovering a series of ecstatic performances in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American realism, Realist Ecstasy travels from camp meetings to Native American ghost dances to storefront church revivals to explore realism's relationship to spiritual experience. In her approach to realism as both an unruly archive of performance and a wide-ranging repertoire of media practicesincluding literature, photography, audio recording, and early filmLindsay V. Reckson argues that the real was repetitively enacted and reenacted through bodily practice. Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference, while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities em
Trade Review
This book’s significance lies in Lindsay Reckson’s ability to rethink literary tropes and tactics through a profound attention to embodiment—bodily gesture, comportment, performance, reenactment. Realist Ecstasy traces how bodies come undone into practices that threaten the very category of the real. Theoretically fascinating and solidly grounded, Reckson’s work places performance in conversation with photography and the literary, forcing each to account for one another across her archival ensemble. -- Rebecca Schneider, author of Performing Remains
