A Study Guide for Susan Glaspell's "Alison's House," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Susan Glaspell's "The Verge," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Susan Glaspell's "Trifles," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

A Study Guide for Emily Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are You?," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

Susan Glaspell in Context not only discusses the dramatic work of this key American author -- perhaps best known for her short story "A Jury of Her Peers" and its dramatic counterpart, Trifles -- but also places it within the theatrical, cultural, political, social, historical, and biographical climates in which Glaspell's dramas were created: the worlds of Greenwich Village and Provincetown bohemia, of the American frontier, and of American modernism. J. Ellen Gainor is Professor of Theatre, Women's Studies, and American Studies, Cornell University. Her other books include Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (co-edited with Jeffrey D. Mason) from the University of Michigan Press.

A cofounder of the Provincetown Players - the group that acted as midwife to the American theatre - Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) can also lay claim to be a major figure in her own right. Her early plays were in many respects as challenging and original as those with which O'Neill made his debut. Her concern with language as subject, with character as an expression of social role, with plot as a mechanism that may ensnare rather than locate the self, mode her very much a modern. In Trifles (1916) she developed a feminist critique of social role. In The Outside (1917) she staged a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In both plays silence becomes an eloquent expression of meaning. The Verge (1921) is an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. Though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional it touched a contemporary nerve, questioning the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known only for a single play, Susan Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative daring.

Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, and other creative writers, 1900-1960.