The Oxford Handbook of American Drama PDF Download

Author: Jeffrey H. Richards
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199731497
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
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.

Author: Gary A. Richardson
Publisher: Heinle & Heinle Publishers
ISBN:
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1218

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Book Description
American Drama: Colonial to Contemporary is intended for students of American Drama in English, Theatre, and American Studies courses. Its primary aim is to provide students with a broad historical sense of the transofrmations of American drama from its beginnings to the presnt, making certain that this historical sense is as diverse as possible. As the most comprehensive anthology of American drama available for classroom use, it is a hope that this anthology will foster in the reader an appreciation of the diversity and vitality of the American experience as expressed through drama.

Author: Paul Thifault
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000598691
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
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.

Author: Marc Robinson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780801856303
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection of essays provides an alternative to the accepted account of the development of American drama. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Author: Matthew Charles Roudané
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
"In the early 1960s two leaders of the New York performance group Living Theatre were asked to define its purpose. In this survey of contemporary American drama, Matthew C. Roudane argues that the response of these two pioneers in experimental theater - Julian Beck and Judith Malina - goes a long way toward explaining the purpose of all of the rich and varied dramas to appear on the stage since 1960: "To increase conscious awareness, to stress the sacredness of life, to break down the walls."" "African-American playwrights (Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka), women playwrights (Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley), gay playwrights (Harvey Fierstein, Tony Kushner), and others have over the past three and a half decades entreated audiences to acknowledge the persistence of racism, sexism, homophobia, and a host of other societal ills. Other playwrights have asked audiences to confront their own mortality (Edward Albee), their compromised morality (David Mamet), their unfulfilled American Dream (Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, and countless others)." "Whatever the particularities of these playwrights' personal identities, politics, of dramatic style, they share a willingness to confront uncomfortable truths about the human condition in America since 1960. Ironically, it is in their very rebellion against any number of things American that they identify themselves and their literature as such." "Roudane takes no scattershot approach to his subject. Favoring clusters of themes and the broad sweep of movements to linear chronology, he develops a carefully aimed analysis of the work of about two dozen of the hundreds of playwrights whose dramas have, since 1960, been performed in every venue, from regional and university theaters to Off-Off-Broadway to Off-Broadway to Broadway."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author: Brian Nelson
Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN: 9781557833143
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
(Applause Books). Includes: Amy Hill: Tokyo Bound ; David Henry Hwang: Bondage ; Velina Hasu Houston: As Sometimes in a Dead Man's Face ; Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge: The Gate of Heaven ; Dwight Okita: The Rainy Season .

Author: David Adjmi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472503430
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U.S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U.S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.

Author: Various
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9780140435887
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 564

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Book Description
This unique volume includes eight early dramas that mirror American literary, social, and cultural history: Royall Tylers The Contrast (1789); William Dunlap'sAndre (1798); James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808); Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831); William Henry Smith's The Drunkard(1844); Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion (1845); George Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin(1852); and Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859). For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Author: Kathleen Collins
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062800965
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short-story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, “To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us.” That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author’s talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins’s striking short stories, which explore the ways in which relationships both are formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage, including the screenplay of her pioneering film Losing Ground and the script for The Brothers, which powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African American experience. And finally, it is in Collins’s raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary is a brilliant compendium of the works of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.

Author: Jacqueline Foertsch
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310093
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
An essential introductory textbook that guides students through 300 years of American plays, as well as their remarkable engagement with texts from across the Atlantic. Divided into seven historical periods, Jacqueline Foertsch offers unique overviews of 38 American plays and their reception, from Robert Hunter's Androboros (c.1714) to Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton (2015). Each historical section begins with an overseas play that proved influential to American playwrights in that period, demonstrating to students an astonishing dialogue taking place across the Atlantic. This is an ideal core text for modules on American Drama – or a supplementary text for broader modules on American Literature – which may be offered at the upper levels of an undergraduate literature, drama, theatre studies or American studies degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying American drama as part of a taught postgraduate degree in literature, drama or American studies.