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Examining California's formative years, this innovative study seeks to discover the origins of the California dream and the social, psychological, and symbolic impact it has had not only on Californians but also on the rest of the country.
This book offers a study of the portrayal of America in selected social and political plays of the 1930s and a scrutiny of the intellectual response of the playwrights to the American way of life in the light of socio-political and economic issues in that decade.
What happened in American drama in the years between the Depression and the conclusion of World War II? How did war make its impact on the theatre? More important, how was drama used during the war years to shape American beliefs and actions? Albert Wertheim's Staging the War brings to light the important role played by the drama during what might arguably be called the most important decade in American history. As much of the country experienced the dislocation of military service and work in war industries, the dramatic arts registered the enormous changes to the boundaries of social classes, ethnicities, and gender roles. In research ranging over more than 150 plays, Wertheim discusses some of the well-known works of the period, including The Time of Your Life, Our Town, Watch on the Rhine, and All My Sons. But he also uncovers little-known and largely unpublished plays for the stage and radio, by such future luminaries as Arthur Miller and Frank Loesser, including those written at the behest of the U.S. government or as U.S.O. musicals. The American son of refugees who escaped the Third Reich in 1937, Wertheim gives life to this vital period in American history.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo has dazzled and challenged audiences with its unique aesthetic design and startling plot devices since its release in 1958. In Classical Vertigo: Mythic Shapes and Contemporary Influences in Hitchcock’s Film, Mark William Padilla analyzes antecedents including: (1) the film’s source novel, D’entre les morts (Among the Dead), (2) the earlier symbolist novel, Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, and (3) the first-draft screenplay of Maxwell Anderson, a prominent Broadway dramatist and Hollywood scenarist from the 1920s to the 1950s. The presence of Vertigo amid these texts reveals and clarifies how themes from Greco-Roman antiquity emerge in Hitchcock’s project. Padilla analyzes narrative figures such as Prometheus and Pandora, Persephone and Hades, and Pygmalion and Galatea, as well as themes like the dark plots of Greek tragedy, to reveal how Hitchcock used allusive form to construct an emotionally powerful experience with an often-minimalist script. This analysis demonstrates that Vertigo is a multifaceted work of intertextuality with artistic and cultural roots extending into antiquity itself.
From the 1920s through the 1950s Maxwell Anderson was one of the most important playwrights in America. His thirty-three produced plays make him a leader among these playwrights of America's most creative era in the theater, and a number of his plays have shown a lasting vitality and importance. What Price Glory (1924) dramatized the disillusionment and horror of World War I . With Elizabeth the Queen (1929), Winterset (1935), and High Tor (1936), Anderson revived poetic drama in the modern theater. His versatility as a playwright was further reflected in the satire Both Your Houses (1933), the historical parable Joan of Lorraine (1946), and the musical play Lost in the Stars (1949). This ed...
A broad treatment of the cultural, social, political, and literary under-pinnings of an entire period and movement in American letters The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic con...
High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria. The collection also deals with a number of literary representations of earlier historical queens such as Cleopatra, and semi-historical ones such as Gertrude, Tamora, and Lady Macbeth, and such fictional ones as Hermione and the queen of Cymbeline, all of them Shakespeare characters. This fascinating look at Renaissance queens also examines myth and folklore, Romantic or Victorian representations, and the depictions of queens like Catherine de Medici of France in twentieth century film.
This volume contains 44 original essays on the role of periodicals in the United States and Canada. Over 120 magazines are discussed by expert contributors, completely reshaping our understanding of the construction and emergence of modernism.
The comprehensive biography of one of the 20th century's most influential cartoonists, the legendary creator of Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates. This book analyzes his storytelling techniques, examines his artistic innovations and work routines, and serves as a history of the medium. Milton Caniff was one of the most influential American cartoonists of the 20th century. He rose to prominence during World War II when he took the characters in his Terry and the Pirates strip into the war. The trenchant pragmatic patriotism of the strip warmed hearts and steeled nerves on the home front as well as the battlefront (one of his strips was read into the Congressional Record). He went on to c...