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During the first half of the 20th century approximately 10,000 short plays were written in the United States. This book examines twenty one-act plays by authors such as Mary Shaw, Susan Glaspell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who wrote from such diverse backgrounds as women's clubs, art theaters, or commercial theaters. This study argues that the plays share a structural organization along spatial dichotomies of theatrical space within and theatrical space without. While some writers use the underlying structure of separate spheres and organize place and space in order to promote a broader definition of «domesticity», the spatial configurations in other plays are read as appropriations, affirmations, negotiations, subversions, or transgressions of the separate spheres dichotomy. Substantial bibliographies documenting the productivity of the one-act genre supplement this study.
Co-founder of the Provincetown Players and one of its leading writers, Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House (1930) and was also successful as an actress, producer, and novelist. Her plays were compared, often favorably, with O'Neill's. After a period of eclipse, Glaspell's concern with woman's desire for selfhood brought her plays to the attention of feminist scholarship beginning in the 1970s. Mary Papke argues in this work for a reassessment of Glaspell as a major American playwright. This sourcebook begins with a bio-critical survey and includes plot summaries for each staged work, complete with production history and critical reception. An annotated bibliography of primary works includes plays, novels, short fiction, nonfiction, nonprint, and archival sources. The secondary bibliography documents reviews and provides extensive annotations for a broad range of materials. Chronologically organized, it constitutes a detailed examiniation of Glaspell criticism.
This text is an introduction to the full range of standard reference tools in all branches of English studies. More than 10,000 titles are included. The Reference Guide covers all the areas traditionally defined as English studies and all the field of inquiry more recently associated with English studies. British and Irish, American and world literatures written in English are included. Other fields covered are folklore, film, literary theory, general and comparative literature, language and linguistics, rhetoric and composition, bibliography and textual criticism and women's studies.
First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.
"An engrossing biography about the marital breakdown of a major literary figure, of particular interest for what it reveals about O'Neill's creative process, activities, and bohemian lifestyle at the time of his early successes and some of his most interesting experimental work. In addition, King's discussion of Boulton's efforts as a writer of pulp fiction in the early part of the 20th century reveals an interesting side of popular fiction writing at that time, and gives insight into the lifestyle of the liberated woman." ---Stephen Wilmer, Trinity College, Dublin Biographers of American playwright Eugene O'Neill have been quick to label his marriage to actress Carlotta Monterey as the defining relationship of his illustrious career. But in doing so, they overlook the woman whom Monterey replaced---Agnes Boulton, O'Neill's wife of over a decade and mother to two of his children. O'Neill and Boulton were wed in 1918---a time when she was a successful pulp novelist and he was still a little-known writer of one-act plays. During the decade of their marriage, he gained fame as a Broadway dramatist who rejected commercial compromise, while she mapped that contentious territory known as the literary marriage. His writing reflected her, and hers reflected him, as they tried to realize progressive ideas about what a marriage should be. But after O'Neill left the marriage, he and new love Carlotta Monterey worked diligently to put Boulton out of sight and mind---and most O'Neill biographers have been quick to follow suit. William Davies King has brought Agnes Boulton to light again, providing new perspectives on America's foremost dramatist, the dynamics of a literary marriage, and the story of a woman struggling to define herself in the early twentieth century. King shows how the configuration of O'Neill and Boulton's marriage helps unlock many of O'Neill's plays. Drawing on more than sixty of Boulton's published and unpublished writings, including her 1958 memoir, Part of a Long Story, and an extensive correspondence, King rescues Boulton from literary oblivion while offering the most radical revisionary reading of the work of Eugene O'Neill in a generation. William Davies King is Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of several books, most recently Collections of Nothing, chosen by Amazon.com as one of the Best Books of 2008. Illustration: Eugene O'Neill, Shane O'Neill, and Agnes Boulton ca. 1923. Eugene O'Neill Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
A second edition of Coriolanus featuring a new introductory section by Bridget Escolme.
An indespensable companion to The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Edition, this is the most comprehensive reference work on Shakespearean textual problems ever compiled in a single volume. William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion provides a wealth of information about the problems presented by texts and the processes by which editorial decisions are reached. The General Introduction discusses the critical and theoretical issues raised by different kinds of editions, the nature of early manuscripts, printed texts, and the evidence for the canon and chronology of Shakespeare's works. It also offers a concise history of the editing of Shakespeare and sets forth the editorial principles of the Oxford Edition. Included for each work, are an introduction, textual notes, press variants, discussions of emendations and problems of modernization, plausible alternative readings, and a letter-by-letter reprint of the stage directions in the control text, among other materials. --