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Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. By Robert C. Allen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xviii + 350 pp. Cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-1960-3. Paper, $12.95, ISBN 0-8078-4316-4.)
To the steadily expanding library of books on American popular culture, Robert C. Allen's study of burlesque is a particularly welcome addition. Not only has burlesque been overlooked in favor of vaudeville and motion pictures but few other studies of commercial amusements match Allen's conceptual sophistication.
Allen, though focusing on the nineteenth-century era, covers the entire run of American burlesque, from the appearance of the British Blondes of Lydia Thompson in 1868 to its demise in the 1930s. Allen also ranges broadly across theater history of the early and mid-nineteenth century in order to place burlesque firmly within the show business tradition....