The Search for America's Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age

Abstract

During the 1920s jazz was by far the most important and controversial form of cultural production in the United States. It was also decisive in separating an emergent literary theatre, which disdained jazz for its alleged social and moral depravity, and musical comedy and vaudeville, which not only embraced jazz but became crucial arenas for its development and dissemination. By analyzing early Gershwin musicals, this essay argues that musical comedy, by ingeniously mixing highbrow and lowbrow, became a privileged site in which the debates about the social, cultural, racial, and ethnic status of jazz were both thematized and enacted.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.