Sanford Sternlicht presents a comprehensive survey of modern American drama beginning with its antecedents in Victorian melodrama through the present. He discusses the work and achievement of more than seventy playwrights, from Eugene O’Neill to Suzan-Lori Parks—from the golden era of Broadway to the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theater. Stern-licht shows how world theater influenced the American stage, and how the views of American dramatists reflected the great American social movements of their times. In addition, he describes the contributions of early experimental theater, the Federal Theater of the 1930s, African American, feminist, and gay and lesbian drama—and the joyous trends and triumphs of American musical theater.

African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.

James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide, which Choice calls "the standard guide in the field," evaluates important reference materials in English studies. Since the publication of the first edition in 1989, tens of thousands of students and educators have used the Guide as an aid to scholarly research. In the new edition Harner has added entries describing resources published since May 2001 and has revised nearly half the entries from the fourth edition. The fifth edition contains more than 1,000 entries, which discuss an additional 1,555 books, articles, and electronic resources and cite 723 reviews. Readers of earlier editions will notice the inclusion of substantially more electronic resources, particularly reliable sites sponsored by academic institutions and learned societies, to account for the proliferation of bibliographic databases, text archives, and other online resources. This edition also features a new section on cultural studies.

An outstanding research guide for undergraduate students of American literature, this best-selling book is essential when it comes to researching American authors. Bracken and Hinman identify and describe the best and most current sources, both in print and online, for nearly 300 American writers whose works are included in the most frequently used literary anthologies. Students will know exactly what information is available and where to find it.

"This new and updated Guide, with over 2,700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the U.S., plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major U.S. cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Highly illustrated, the Guide is supplemented with a historical survey as introduction, a bibliography of major sources published since the first edition, and a biographical index covering over 3,200 individuals mentioned in the text."--BOOK JACKET.

"American Drama/Critics: Writings and Readings" is a collection of essays on acknowledged classics of American drama such as "Death of a Salesman," "The Glass Menagerie," and "Our Town," and on newer but no less esteemed works like David Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" and Sam Shepard's "Buried Child." Included are interviews with the great American drama critics Eric Bentley and Stanley Kauffmann; a consideration of the practice of American dramaturgy; an analysis of the adaptation to film of several American dramas; and an examination of experimental playwriting and production in the United States, as seen in the work of Gertrude Stein as well as that of other, lesser-known avant-garde dramatists. This book's thesis is not only the generally accepted one that American drama is essentially a representational one and that its avant-garde experiments are just that--experimental detours that ultimate lead back to the main highway of realism and naturalism. The thesis of "Americam Drama/Critics" is also that the decline of American drama in the late twentieth to early twenty-first century is paralleled by, and even attributable to, the decline or disappearance of American dramatic criticism.

This guide covers theatre as literature and offers listings of scholarly explications from colonial to contemporary, Edward Albee to Tennessee Williams. Arranged alphabetically by playwright and play title, the bibliography covers both periodicals and book-length criticism and reflects a variety of critical methods.