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Reading for Reform: The Social Work of Literature in the Progressive Era. By Laura R. Fisher. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. viii + 307 pp. $112.00 cloth/$28.oo paper.
Is the American Progressive Era a literary period? Defining it as the years from 1890 to 1920, it is, from a literary perspective, an age of realism and naturalism, the New Negro and the New Woman, and the first stirrings of modernism. These frames, however, do not capture the literary dimensions of progressivism as such. Progressivism was not just a political movement; it was a widespread cultural orientation, a commitment to solving social problems that challenged social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism but ultimately sought stability rather than revolution. Because of progressivism's importance as a cultural substrate, it makes sense to talk about progressive literature in the same way that we talk about, say, the literature of Cold War liberalism, but few critics have adopted that perspective. But as Laura R. Fisher demonstrates in this admirable book, progressive reform institutions-the settlement house, the working girls' club, the corporate-philanthropy-backed African American college, and the undercover social investigation-produced not only thriving "amateur literary cultures" but also a distinctive kind of literary theory that influenced canonical writers and critics (4). She illuminates not just a literature but also a literary theory of progressivism, in one of its major tendencies.
The theme of this literary theory, in Fisher's account, is "the politics of proximity," or the relationship between points "far and near" in social space...