scholarly journals Suzannah Biernoff, Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. viii $+$ 213, $70, hardback, ISBN: 9780472130290. - Fiona Reid, Medicine in First World War Europe: Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), pp. xi $+$ 283, £19.99, paperback, ISBN: 9781472505927.

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-392
Author(s):  
Jay Winter
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
World War ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
First World

Two-a-Day Redemptions and Truncated Camilles: the Vaudeville Repertoire of Sarah Bernhardt

1994 ◽  
Vol 10 (37) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leigh Woods
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
World War ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
British Music ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The University ◽  
First World

American vaudeville welcomed a host of important stage actors into its midst during the generation between the mid-1890s and the end of the First World War, and in 1912, following appearances in British music halls, Sarah Bernhardt became vaudeville's centrepiece in its own war with the legitimate theatre for audience and status. By way of exchange, she received the highest salary ever paid to a ‘headlined’ vaudeville act, while performing a repertoire from which she was able to exclude the sort of light entertainment which had previously typified the medium. Both vaudeville and Bernhardt profited, in very different ways, from this wedding of high culture to low – and in the process a cultural standing seems to have attached itself to exhibitions of pain which legitimised the lot of the morally deviant women she both portrayed and exemplified. Leigh Woods, Head of Theatre Studies at the University of Michigan, explores the ways in which the great actress thus maintained a demand for her services well after the eclipse of her legendary beauty and matchless movement.

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