In this book, Susan Harris Smith looks at the many often conflicting cultural and academic reasons for the neglect and dismissal of American drama as a legitimate literary form. Covering a wide range of topics such as theatrical performance, the rise of nationalist feeling, the creation of academic disciplines, and the development of sociology, Smith's study is a contentious and revisionist historical inquiry into the troubled cultural and canonical status of American drama, both as a literary genre and as a mirror of American society.

An anthology of articles from periodicals of the 1890s, chosen to reflect various aspects of American culture during the last fin-de-siecle.

America at the last fin de siecle was in a period of profound societal transition. Industrialization was well under way and with it a burgeoning sense of professionalism and a growing middle class that was becoming increasingly anxious about issues of race, gender, and class. "The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader" is a wide-ranging anthology of essays, criticism, and fiction first printed in periodicals during those last remarkable years of the nineteenth century, a decade commonly referred to as the "golden age" of periodical culture.
To depict the many changes taking place in the...

Between 1890 and 1918, over 125 American, English, Irish and AngloIndian plays by 70 dramatists were published in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer. Ranging from elite publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's to more mid-level venues such as McClure's and Everybody's Magazine to progressive magazines such as Arena and Forum, the plays dramatized a wide range of American concerns, including anxieties about "race suicide," immigration, "white slavery," the New Woman, class distinctions, global warfare, and the creation of a...

This anthology of plays written between 1890 and 1918 shows Americans to have been "dis/contented" citizens, conflicted by the demands of a dynamically changing nation.