Scholars@Duke
Michael F D'Alessandro

Michael F D'Alessandro CV

Associate Professor of English
English
michael.dalessandro@duke.edu
Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708
Duke University, English Dept., Campus Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708
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Selected Publications

Dickens and Shakespeare and Longfellow, Oh My!: Staging the Fan Canon at the Nineteenth-Century Authors’ Carnivals

Journal Article American Literary History · May 11, 2023 AbstractBeginning in the 1870s, the short-lived fad of “Authors’ Carnivals” swept through American cities. At each carnival, hundreds of locals costumed themselves as famous literary characters, performing a ... Full text Cite

At-Home Humbugs: Freaks and Fakes in the Nineteenth-Century Parlor Museum

Journal Article Theatre Survey · January 2022 In April 1885, aNew York Heraldjournalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had ... Full text Cite

Staged Readings Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835-75

Book · 2022 The book will be particularly appealing to those interested in histories of popular theater, literature and reading, social class, and mass culture. ... Cite

"If Actresses Ever Are Themselves": Living Pictures, Dying Women, and British Class Pretensions in Alcott's Behind a Mask

Journal Article ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture · 2022 Full text Cite

Stumbling Into Utopia

Other Duke Magazine · August 7, 2019 Link to item Cite

The Drunkard's Directions: Mapping Urban Space in the Antebellum Temperance Drama

Journal Article The New England Quarterly · June 2014 William H. Smith's The Drunkard (premiering in 1844) broke attendance records at Moses Kimball's Boston Museum and P. T. Barnum's American Museum in New York. Portraying the ills of intemperance, the melodrama also foregrounded thrilling scenes of ... Full text Cite

The Mouth Trap: Orality and the Rabelaisian Grotesque in Norris’s McTeague

Journal Article Studies in American Naturalism · June 2014 Full text Cite