This Companion provides an original and authoritative surveyof twentieth-century American drama studies, written by some of thebest scholars and critics in the field. Balances consideration of canonical material with discussion ofworks by previously marginalized playwrights Includes studies of leading dramatists, such as TennesseeWilliams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O'Neill and Gertrude Stein Allows readers to make new links between particular plays andplaywrights Examines the movements that framed the century, such as theHarlem Renaissance, lesbian and gay drama, and the soloperformances of the 1980s and 1990s Situates American drama within larger discussions aboutAmerican ideas and culture

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.

John Houchin explores the impact of censorship in twentieth-century American theatre. He argues that theatrical censorship coincides with significant challenges to religious, political and cultural traditions. Along with the well-known instance of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, other almost equally influential events shaped the course of the American stage during the century. The book is arranged in chronological order. It provides a summary of censorship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and then analyses key political and theatrical events between 1900 and 2000. These include a discussion of the 1913 riot after the Abbey Theatre touring produdtion of Playboy of the Western World; protests against Clifford Odet's Waiting for Lefty, performed by militant workers during the Depression; and reactions to the recent play Angels in America.

Drawing on the fields of dramaturgy, music theory, and historical musicology, this book answers a question about twentieth-century music: Why does tonality persist in opera, even after it has been abandoned in other genres?

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 book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.

The final volume of Christopher Bigsby's critical account of American drama in the twentieth century.

A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.

Looking at a century of American theatre, McDaniel investigates how race-based notions of maternal performance become sites of resistance to cultural and political hierarchies. This book considers how the construction of mothering as universally women's work obscures additional, equally constructed subdivisions based in race and class.

The Theater of Trauma is a groundbreaking rereading of the relations between psychology and drama in the age of Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and their many brilliant contemporaries. American modernist Theater of Trauma drew its vision from the psychological investigation of trauma and its consequences - among them hysteria and dissociation - made by French and American psychiatrists such as the great Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, William James, Morton Prince, and W.E.B. Du Bois; the European and American «dissociationist culture» that developed around their work; and the resulting trauma of World War I. American dramatists' deep resistance to Freud's suppression of trauma challenges the equation of Freud and modernism that has become commonplace in modernist criticism.