Drawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.

Bringing together some of the best work from the 2015 Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore, this book covers subjects from ancient Greece to 21st century America with a variety of approaches and formats, including two transcripts, 10 research papers and six book reviews. This year's highlight is the keynote conversation featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. This volume is the twelfth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest research in the fields of comparative drama, performance and dramatic textual analysis.

The American Progressive Era, which spanned from the 1880s to the 1920s, is generally regarded as a dynamic period of political reform and social activism. In Performing the Progressive Era, editors Max Shulman and Chris Westgate bring together top scholars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre studies to examine the burst of diverse performance venues and styles of the time, revealing how they shaped national narratives surrounding immigration and urban life. Contributors analyze performances in urban centers (New York, Chicago, Cleveland) in comedy shows, melodramas, Broadway shows, operas, and others. They pay special attention to performances by and for those outside mainstream society: immigrants, the working-class, and bohemians, to name a few. Showcasing both lesser-known and famous productions, the essayists argue that the explosion of performance helped bring the Progressive Era into being, and defined its legacy in terms of gender, ethnicity, immigration, and even medical ethics.

Rowdy Carousals makes important interventions in nineteenth-century theatre history with regard to the Bowery Boy, a raucous, white, urban character most famously exemplified by Mose from A Glance at New York in 1848. The book's examination of working-class whiteness on stage, in the theatre, and in print culture invites theatre historians and critics to check the impulse to downplay or ignore questions about race and ethnicity in discussion of the Bowery Boy and further explores links between the Bowery Boy's rowdyism in the nineteenth century and the resurgence of white supremacy in the early twenty-first century.

Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1538 to 1880. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in American during the colonial era and the first century of the United States of America, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such figures as Lewis Hallam, David Douglass, Mercy Otis Warren, Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, Joseph Jefferson, Ida Aldridge, Dion Boucicault, Edwin Booth, and many others. The Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Beginnings covers the history of early American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the early American Theater.

Literary texts are artifacts of their time and ideologies. This book collection explores the working class in American literature from the colonial to the contemporary period through a critical lens which addresses the real problems of approaching class through economics. Significantly, this book moves the analysis of working-class literature away from the Marxist focus on the relationship between class and the means of production and applies an innovative concept of class based on the sociological studies of humans and society first championed by Max Weber. Of primary concern is the construction of class separation through the concept of in-grouping/out grouping. This book builds upon the theories established in John F. Lavelle's Blue Collar, Theoretically: A Post-Marxist Approach to Working Class Literature (McFarland, 2011) and puts them into practice by examining a diverse set of texts that reveal the complexity of class relations in American society.

In early twentieth-century U.S. culture, sex sold. While known mainly for its social reforms, the Progressive Era was also obsessed with prostitution, sexuality, and the staging of women’s changing roles in the modern era. By the 1910s, plays about prostitution (or “brothel dramas”) had inundated Broadway, where they sometimes became long-running hits and other times sparked fiery obscenity debates. In Sex for Sale, Katie N. Johnson recovers six of these plays, presenting them with astute cultural analysis, photographs, and production histories. The result is a new history of U.S. theatre that reveals the brothel drama’s crucial role in shaping attitudes toward sexuality, birth control, immigration, urbanization, and women’s work. The volume includes the work of major figures including Eugene O’Neill, John Reed, Rachel Crothers, and Elizabeth Robins. Now largely forgotten and some previously unpublished, these plays were among the most celebrated and debated productions of their day. Together, their portrayals of commercialized vice, drug addiction, poverty, white slavery, and interracial desire reveal the Progressive Era’s fascination with the underworld and the theatre’s power to regulate sexuality. Additional plays, commentary, and teaching materials are available at brotheldrama.lib.miamioh.edu. Plays included: Ourselves (1913) by Rachel Crothers The Web (1913) by Eugene O’Neill My Little Sister (1913) by Elizabeth Robins Moondown (1915) by John Reed Cocaine (1916) by Pendleton King A Shanghai Cinderella (renamed East is West, 1918) by Samuel Shipman and John B. Hymer