Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890-1916

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.