This anthology gathers some of Modern Drama's most distinguished pieces on America's four most important playwrights since Eugene O'Neill: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. While Parker has chosen these authors "as representative of the main stream of American dramatic tradition," she does not offer a general overview of the plays or playwrights, nor any general orientation to aid the reader. These essays are written by scholars for serious students of American drama. The majority of the essays concentrate on a single play, and while they appeared decades ago, all were major articles in the field. Old but solid, they should still be of interest to students and scholars alike.

Taking as its starting-point the 'death of tragedy' debate, and focusing on the supposed disappearance from the stage of the individual tragic hero, the book views selected plays and writings on the theatre by Miller, Williams, Maxwell Anderson and O'Neill as exemplifying four versions of heroism: idealism, martyrdom, self-reflection and survival. Julie Adam shows that these diverse playwrights share a desire to redefine tragic heroism in individualistic liberal terms.

Features a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.

The new essays in this collection, on such diverse writers as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving, fill an important conceptual gap. The essayists offer numerous approaches to intertextuality: the influence of the poetry of romanticism and Shakespeare and of histories and novels, ideological and political discourses on American playwrights, unlikely connections between such writers as Miller and Wilder, the problems of intertexts in translation, the evolution in historical and performance contexts of the same tale, and the relationships among feminism, the drama of the courtroom, and the drama of the stage. Intertextuality has been an under-explored area in studies of dramatic and performance texts. The innovative findings of these scholars testify to the continuing vitality of research in American drama and performance.

Daniela Caselli raises timely questions about Djuna Barnes, biography and feminist criticism, identity and authority, and modernist canon formation and tackles a central issue in Barnes: intertextuality. Caselli shows that throughout Barnes's corpus, the repetition of texts, by other authors (from Blake to Middleton) and by Barnes herself, forces us to rethink the relationship between authority and gender in modernism.

"Readers drawn to the "Roaring Twenties," gossip about the Great White Way, discussion of high, middle, and low-brow culture will seek out this book."--BOOK JACKET.