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This volume provides an accessible and engaging guide to the study of American dramatic literature. Designed to support students in reading, discussing, and writing about commonly assigned American plays, this text offers timely resources to think critically and originally about key moments on the American stage. Combining comprehensive coverage of the core plays from the post-Revolutionary era to the present, each chapter includes: historical and cultural context of each of the plays and their distinctive literary features clear introductions to the ongoing critical debates they have provoked collaborative prompts for classroom or online discussion annotated bibliographies for further research With its accessible prose style and clear structure, this introduction spotlights specific plays while encouraging students to contemplate timely questions of American identity across its selected span of US theatrical history.
This volume explores the history of American drama from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It describes origins of early republican drama and its evolution during the pre-war and post-war periods. It traces the emergence of different types of American drama including protest plays, reform drama, political drama, experimental drama, urban plays, feminist drama and realist plays. This volume also analyzes the works of some of the most notable American playwrights including Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and those written by women dramatists.
Provides a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to American classics such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Thornton Wilder's Our Town to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.
This interdisciplinary collection of 19 essays addresses violence on the American stage. Topics include the revolutionary period and the role of violence in establishing national identity, violence by and against ethnic groups, and females as perpetrators and victims, as well as state and psychological violence and violence within the family. The book works to assess whether representing violence may cause its cessation, or whether it generates further destruction. Featured playwrights include Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Amiri Baraka, Luis Valdes, Cherrie Moraga, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Neil LaBute, John Guare, Rebecca Gilman, and Heather MacDonald.
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Dr Bigsby analyses the early unpublished plays and the major works of Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee.
This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.
Sanford Sternlicht presents a comprehensive survey of modern American drama beginning with its antecedents in Victorian melodrama through the present. He discusses the work and achievement of more than seventy playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Suzan-Lori Parks—from the golden era of Broadway to the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theater. Stern-licht shows how world theater influenced the American stage, and how the views of American dramatists reflected the great American social movements of their times. In addition, he describes the contributions of early experimental theater, the Federal Theater of the 1930s, African American, feminist, and gay and lesbian drama—and the joyous trends and triumphs of American musical theater.
The central subject of American drama is, arguably, the American family. From Royall Tyler's colonial comedy The Contrast (1787) to August Wilson's King Hedley II (2000), relationships between husbands, wives, and their children have been used consistently by American playwrights to explore and illuminate the American experience. This study of the family in twentieth-century American drama explores how filial relationships are affected by the capitalistic culture of consumption that permeates twentieth-century American society. By analyzing relationships within both traditional and nontraditional families, this book examines how family members in American plays perceive themselves and others as «things» in American twentieth-century capitalistic society.
The importance of Native American realism is traced through a study of the evolution of dramatic theory from the early 1890s through World War I and the uniquely American innovations in realistic drama between world wars.