Octoroon
Book Details
Delivery Location
Delivery fee: Select location
A new edition of the most popular and controversial drama from the writer whose plays have been described as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”
Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroon was produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault’s dramas as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”
In The Octoroon—the most controversial play of his career—Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon—a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroon opened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation—as it did in its subsequent British production.
This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.
Get Octoroon by at the best price and quality guaranteed only at Werezi Africa's largest book ecommerce store. The book was published by Broadview Press Ltd and it has pages.
