Abstract

While Louis Napoleon Parker is recognized as the originator of the Edwardian village pageants, his First World War pageants have not, to date, received scholarly attention. Although critics have long associated the Edwardian revival of pageantry with nostalgia and an ahistorical treatment of the past, Parker's war-time pageantry in fact avoids facile and crudely propagandistic depictions of history. Instead, these public performances of history foreground self-conscious and critical examinations of history. Situating Parker's war-time pageants in conversation with the growing body of work on historical reenactment, this essay proposes that the war-time pageants manipulate historical distance so as to alternately produce affective proximity and cognitive distance.

pdf

Share