Introduction

The introduction sets up the centrality of women and girls to the growth of American theater seen through the development of the starring system and establishes the role of patriarchal institutions, including celebrity culture, in shaping their lives and careers. It follows a survey of prevailing scholarly arguments about the changing structure and content of antebellum theater, women’s changing relationship with public life, and the rise of modern celebrity culture by establishing the book’s key contributions to the literature. This book centers the structural and aesthetic contributions of women to the growth of American theater and offering new analysis of their lived and performed negotiation of American gender ideologies, focused on a broader cohort of historical figures, as shown in the chapter overview.

Réplica a Luis Garagalza

This is a reply to the presentation by Luis Garagalza’s paper called: “Following the Steps of Hermes: The Symbolic Hermeneutics as a Contribution to the Imaginary Studies”. which attempts to level overly extreme claims of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics, mainly from philological practice and from the Latin American gender perspective. If contemporary hermeneutics accesses a philosophical status from philology, here we try to review whether some of its most radical claims remain consistent with philological practice and from the present gender perspective. There are extreme statements such as the cancellation of the validity of the methods or that there are no facts but interpretations, which require a more sensible balance. We believe that a work of grief is imposed regarding the omnipotence of the old epistemic methods, which does not imply the cancellation of its guiding validity, but only an awareness of its limitations. This grief work should not imply a complete break with the past models but a letting go of the non-functional expectations, but also a recovery of what is valuable.