A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume 1, 1900-1940 PDF Download

Author: C. W. E. Bigsby
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521271165
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Eugene O'Neill - Clifford Odets - Left-wing theatre - Black drama - Thornton Wilder - Lillian Hellman - Luigi Pirandello - Arthur Miller.

Author: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438129661
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
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.

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: Armin Paul Frank
Publisher: Wallstein Verlag
ISBN: 9783892443179
Category : America
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Author: Charles S. Watson
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081318889X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Mention southern drama at a cocktail party or in an American literature survey, and you may hear cries for "Stella!" or laments for "gentleman callers." Yet southern drama depends on much more than a menagerie of highly strung spinsters and steel magnolias. Charles Watson explores this field from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots through the southern Literary Renaissance and Tennessee Williams's triumphs to the plays of Horton Foote, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Such well known modern figures as Lillian Hellman and DuBose Heyward earn fresh looks, as does Tennessee Williams's changing depiction of the South—from sensitive analysis to outraged indictment—in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Watson links the work of the early Charleston dramatists and of Espy Williams, first modern dramatist of the South, to later twentieth-century drama. Strong heroines in plays of the Confederacy foreshadow the spunk of Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield. Claiming that Beth Henley matches the satirical brilliance of Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor, Watson connects her zany humor to 1840s New Orleans farces. With this work, Watson has at last answered the call for a single-volume, comprehensive history of the South's dramatic literature. With fascinating detail and seasoned perception, he reveals the rich heritage of southern drama.

Author: Alan Louis Ackerman
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801869112
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
In The Portable Theater, Alan Ackerman investigates the crucial importance of theater in the works of Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James. Whether as drama critics, playwrights, amateur actors, or simply as avid theater goers, each of these authors thought deeply about the theater and represented it in literature.

Author: Ralph J. Poole
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443809535
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. Addressing these issues from a variety of different angles, including historical, aesthetic, cultural, phenomenological, and psychological approaches, these essays present a complex picture of the cultural work and passionate politics accomplished by melodrama over the course of the past two centuries, particularly at times of profound social change.

Author: James Fisher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538107864
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 810

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Book Description
This book covers the history of theater as well as the literature of America from 1880-1930. The years covered by this volume features the rise of the popular stage in America from the years following the end of the Civil War to the Golden Age of Broadway, with an emphasis on its practitioners, including such diverse figures as William Gillette, Mrs. Fiske, George M. Cohan, Maude Adams, David Belasco, George Abbott, Clyde Fitch, Eugene O’Neill, Texas Guinan, Robert Edmond Jones, Jeanne Eagels, Susan Glaspell, The Adlers and the Barrymores, Tallulah Bankhead, Philip Barry, Maxwell Anderson, Mae West, Elmer Rice, Laurette Taylor, Eva Le Gallienne, and a score of others. Entries abound on plays of all kinds, from melodrama to the newly-embraced realistic style, ethnic works (Irish, Yiddish, etc.), and such diverse forms as vaudeville, circus, minstrel shows, temperance plays, etc. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of American Theater: Modernism covers the history of modernist American Theatre through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 2,000 cross-referenced entries on actors and actresses, directors, playwrights, producers, genres, notable plays and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the American Theater in its greatest era.

Author: E. Essin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137108398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
By casting designers as authors, cultural critics, activists, entrepreneurs, and global cartographers, Essin tells a story about scenic images on the page, stage, and beyond that helped American audiences see the everyday landscapes and exotic destinations from a modern perspective.

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.