Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon

Verna Ann Foster (Loyola University of Chicago)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.07: English Writing and Culture of the Victorian Period, 1837-1901.
Vol. editors: Gillian Fenwick (University of Toronto), Jessica Gossling (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1859

Places

United States (Country of Origin; Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

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Dion Boucicault (1820-1890) was the most popular and skilled writer of melodrama in the nineteenth-century theatre of England, America, and his native Ireland. Boucicault’s best-known plays today are his comedy

London Assurance

, his Irish melodramas

The Colleen Bawn

and

The Shaughraun

, and his American melodrama

The Octoroon

. Melodrama developed out of bourgeois tragedy, sentimental drama, and romance in the early nineteenth century in England, France, and Germany. The genre is characterized by sensational plots, stereotypical virtuous and wicked characters, elaborate painted sets, and an emotional mix of thrills, pathos, and humor created by spectacle, tableaux, mood music, expressive acting, and rhetoric (though the dialogue of melodrama is typically functional rather than literary).…

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2339 words

Citation: Foster, Verna Ann. "The Octoroon". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 July 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=38877, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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