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

The article examines the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of "Authors' Carnivals" in American cities, where middle- and upper-class participants dressed as literary characters and performed amateur theatrical tableaux based on a narrow, predominantly Eurocentric literary canon. These carnivals, often organized as charity events, offered a novel form of communal literary fandom and theatrical spectacle but ultimately failed to influence broader American literary culture or theater due to their reliance on outdated texts and disorienting staging. While the events celebrated shared reading experiences and social status, they excluded many contemporary popular American authors and reinforced racial and class exclusivity. The carnivals faded by the mid-1880s, leaving a legacy that highlights both the possibilities and limitations of nineteenth-century cultural imagination in shaping literary taste and theatrical innovation.