One of the founding members of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell contributed to American literature in ways that exceed the work she did for this significant theatre group. Interwoven in her many plays, novels and short stories is astute commentary on the human condition. This volume provides an in-depth examination of Glaspell's writing and how her language conveys her insights into the universal dilemma of society versus self. Glaspell's ideas transcended the plot and character. Her work gave prominent attention to such issues as gender, politics, power and artistic daring. Through an exploration of eight plays written between the years of 1916 and 1943--Trifles, Springs Eternal, The People, Alison's House, Bernice, The Outside, Chains of Dew and The Verge--this work concentrates on one of Glaspell's central themes: individuality versus social existence. It explores the range of forces and fundamental tensions that influence the perception and communication of her characters. The final chapter includes a brief commentary on other Glaspell works. A biographical overview provides background for the author's reading and interpretation of the plays, placing Glaspell within the context of literary modernism.

Founding member of the Provincetown Players, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, best-selling novelist and short story writer Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was a great contributor to American literature. An exploration of eleven plays written between the years 1915 and 1943, this critical study focuses on one of Glaspell's central themes, the interplay between place and identity. This study examines the means Glaspell employs to engage her characters in proxemical and verbal dialectics with the forces of place that turn them into victims of location. Of particular interest are her characters' attempts to escape the influence of territoriality and shape identities of their own.

Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, founding member of the Provincetown Players, best-selling novelist and award-winning short fiction writer, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) has been recovered from the marginalization of women writers that took place in the post-war period of canon-formation in America. Her recovery, begun by feminist critics and theatre historians in the 1980s, reached a milestone with the 1995 publication of the first collection of critical essays, Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction, edited by Linda Ben-Zvi. Since then scholarship has been exploding, with six major books on Glaspell and her work published since the year 2000, several by authors represented here. While Glaspell’s work with the Provincetown Players, 1915-1922, was crucial for the development of American theatre, scholars are now fully realizing the extent to which her stories and novels, as well as all of her plays, reflect a deep engagement with the major literary movements and political events of her age. A realist concerned with issues of social justice and a modernist committed to exploring the psyche, Glaspell through her art provides thoughtful commentary, not only on feminist issues of women and gender, but on war, class, socialism, idealism, aesthetics, ethics and law. Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry continues the tradition started by Ben-Zvi and brings it up to date, featuring new work in various post-structural critical approaches from leading Glaspell scholars, including Americanists Mary E. Papke and Kristina Hinz-Bode; legal scholar, Patricia L. Bryan; cultural historian, J. Ellen Gainor; feminist biographer, Barbara Ozieblo; performance artist, Lucia V. Sander; and classicist Marie Molnar. Praise for the book: "Professor Carpentier's study of Glaspell's fiction stands as the most important work on the subject and has led to a renewed interest in the subject." "There is growing interest in Glaspell's writing, and this book should find a solid readership from the following fields: American drama and fiction studies, American studies, Women's studies, and Cultural Studies. I fully support the project and encourage your press to publish it." Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor of Theatre Studies, Tel Aviv Unviesrity

On a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Greenwich Village bohemians gathered in the summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell was inspired by a sensational murder trial to write Trifles, a play about two women who hide a Midwestern farm wife's motive for murdering her abusive husband. Following successful productions of the play, Glaspell became the "mother of American drama." Her short story version of Trifles, "A Jury of Her Peers," reached an unprecedented one million readers in 1917. The play and the story have since been taught in classrooms across America and Trifles is regularly revived on stages around the world. This collection of fresh essays celebrates the centennial of Trifles and "A Jury of Her Peers," with departures from established Glaspell scholarship. Interviews with theater people are included along with two original works inspired by Glaspell's iconic writings.

A pioneer of American modern drama and founding member of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) wrote plays of a kind that Robert Brustein defines as a “drama of revolt,” an expression of the dramatists’ discontent with the prevailing social, political, and artistic order. Her works display her determination to put an end to the alienating norms that, in her eyes and those of her bohemian peers, were stifling American society. This determination both to denounce infringements on individual rights and to reform American life through the theatre shapes the political dimension of her drama of revolt. Analyzing plays from the early Trifles (1916) through Springs Eternal (1943) and the undated, incomplete Wings, author Emeline Jouve illustrates the way that Glaspell’s dramas addressed issues of sexism, the impact of World War I on American values, and the relationship between individuals and their communities, among other concerns. Jouve argues that Glaspell turns the playhouse into a courthouse, putting the hypocrisy of American democracy on trial. In staging rebels fighting for their rights in fictional worlds that reflect her audience’s extradiegetic reality, she explores the strategies available to individuals to free themselves from oppression. Her works envisage a better future for both her fictive insurgents and her spectators, whom she encourages to consider which modes of revolt are appropriate and effective for improving the society they live in. The playwright defines social reform in terms of collaboration, which she views as an alternative to the dominant, alienating social and political structures. Not simply accusing but proposing solutions in her plays, she wrote dramas that enacted a positive revolt. A must for students of Glaspell and her contemporaries, as well as scholars of American theatre and literature of the first half of the twentieth century.

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre.

Susan Glaspell in Context provides new, accessible, and informative essays by leading international scholars and artists on Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell's life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell's fiction, plays, and non-fiction in both historical and contemporary critical contexts, and demonstrates the significance of Glaspell's writing and other professional activities to a range of academic disciplines and artistic engagements. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell's works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell's career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection's thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

One of the founding members of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell contributed to American literature in ways that exceed the work she did for this significant theatre group. Interwoven in her many plays, novels and short stories is astute commentary on the human condition. This volume provides an in-depth examination of Glaspell's writing and how her language conveys her insights into the universal dilemma of society versus self. Glaspell's ideas transcended the plot and character. Her work gave prominent attention to such issues as gender, politics, power and artistic daring. Through an exploration of eight plays written between the years of 1916 and 1943--Trifles, Springs Eternal, The People, Alison's House, Bernice, The Outside, Chains of Dew and The Verge--this work concentrates on one of Glaspell's central themes: individuality versus social existence. It explores the range of forces and fundamental tensions that influence the perception and communication of her characters. The final chapter includes a brief commentary on other Glaspell works. A biographical overview provides background for the author's reading and interpretation of the plays, placing Glaspell within the context of literary modernism.

In this unprecedented, fascinating book which covers women in theatre from the 1910s to the 2010s, author Lynne Greeley notes that, for the purposes of this study, "feminism" is defined as the political impulse toward economic and social empowerment for females or the female-identified, a position perceived by many feminists as oppositional to ideas of femininity that they see as personally and politically constraining and that "femininity" comprises social behaviors and practices that mean as "many different things as there are women," some of which are empowering and others of which are not. This book illuminates how throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, playwrights and artists in American theatre both embodied and disrupted the feminine of their times. Through approaches as wide ranging as performing their own recipes, energizing silences, raging against war and rape, and inviting the public to inscribe their naked bodies, theatre artists have used performance as a site to insert themselves between the physicality of their female presence and the liminality of their disrupting the role of the feminine. Capturing that place of liminality, a neither-here-nor-there place that is often unsafe, where the established order is overturned by acts as banal as raising a plant, women have written and performed and disrupted their way through one hundred years of theatre history, even within the constraints of a variably rigid and usually unsympathetic social order. Creating a feminist femininity, they have reinscribed their place in the culture and provided models for their audiences to do the same. This comprehensive tome, part of the Cambria Contemporary Global Performing Arts headed by John Clum (Duke University) is an essential addition for theater studies and women's studies.

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.