7/28/2023 0 Comments Urban strife review![]() While the subjects attended to by some of the contributors are meticulously explored in extant scholarship-including the Little Theatre movement, the plays of James A. Forgoing a clearly delineated chronological and thematic structure and wisely eschewing the impractical task of attempting to offer the complete picture of the era's performance culture, the collection instead engages the reader to imagine the sundry performances explored as fragments illustrative of the broader cultural mosaic of which they were a part. It is no surprise then that the eleven essays that follow address a broad range of performances, including not only the traditionally "theatrical" (for example, the Broadway stage, vaudeville, and early film), but also performative genres and sites that have often been marginalized or ignored (tango teas, sideshows, and parades), and do so through a variety of methodological approaches (textual analysis, spatial analysis, reception theory, and so on). In the latter, Shulman and Westgate assert their primary interest in opposition and tension, as well as the ways in which that impulse was manifest across a wide variety of performances in the years considered: "e want readers to experience something of the abundance, variety, and contradictions, of the performative offerings" of the era (10–11). ![]() The centrality of a performance culture that proffered conflict, contradiction, and debate that were indicative of the Progressive era enterprise is central to both the moving foreword authored by Lawrence Senelick, and the thoughtful introduction, "The Destiny of the Nation," authored by the editors. Chris Westgate add to this broadly conceived revisionist project, persuasively situating performance as both a producer and product of the social conflicts, cultural contradictions, and national debates that defined those formative decades in the history of the United States. With Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage, editors Max Shulman and J. More recently, however, scholars have challenged this too-simple account, arguing instead that not only was this period in US history vexed and rife with contradictions, but that those oppositions, in fact, gave rise to the very social energy that constituted the Progressive era. ![]() Although these established scholarly visions of the era do allow for some modicum of resistance (for example, while there was a loosening of conventional views of sex, there remained an abiding sense of moralism), such tensions are considered occasional bumps on an otherwise smooth road toward a brighter, more tolerant, and egalitarian future. Conventional scholarship on the decades from 1890 to 1920 underscores this historical narrative, situating the activist, systematic, and rational advances that influenced all phases of private and public life-including enlightened and liberalizing social programs, reformist political endeavors, and avant-garde artistic innovation-as easily integrated, uniformly accepted, and unproblematically absorbed. As its ascribed name implies, the Progressive era in the United States is typically regarded as a period of vibrant and uncomplicated progress. ![]()
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