This anthology gathers some of Modern Drama's most distinguished pieces on America's four most important playwrights since Eugene O'Neill: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Sam Shepard. While Parker has chosen these authors "as representative of the main stream of American dramatic tradition," she does not offer a general overview of the plays or playwrights, nor any general orientation to aid the reader. These essays are written by scholars for serious students of American drama. The majority of the essays concentrate on a single play, and while they appeared decades ago, all were major articles in the field. Old but solid, they should still be of interest to students and scholars alike.

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

The new essays in this collection, on such diverse writers as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving, fill an important conceptual gap. The essayists offer numerous approaches to intertextuality: the influence of the poetry of romanticism and Shakespeare and of histories and novels, ideological and political discourses on American playwrights, unlikely connections between such writers as Miller and Wilder, the problems of intertexts in translation, the evolution in historical and performance contexts of the same tale, and the relationships among feminism, the drama of the courtroom, and the drama of the stage. Intertextuality has been an under-explored area in studies of dramatic and performance texts. The innovative findings of these scholars testify to the continuing vitality of research in American drama and performance.

This book refutes the claim that tragedy is no longer a vital and relevant part of contemporary American theatre. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre examines plays by multiple contemporary playwrights and compares them alongside the works of America’s major twentieth-century tragedians: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. The book argues that tragedy is not only present in contemporary American theatre, but issues from an expectation fundamental to American culture: the pressure on characters to create themselves. Tragedy in the Contemporary American Theatre concludes that tragedy is vital and relevant, though not always in the Aristotelian model, the standard for traditional evaluation.

The discussion addresses the task of theater images in a cultural field where the real is mistaken for its reflection, originality constantly played against seriality, at a moment when simulacra, clones, and emulations of selves and texts become firmly established as the norm. The accommodation of pop icons on stage and the results this framing yields constitute this work's primary interests and aims."--Jacket.

Although ancestral voices have inspired many Armenian American writers of poetry and fiction in the twentieth century, their expression through drama has been limited. The first of its kind, this anthology is a collection of plays by notable Armenian Americans. Written in English largely by artists of Armenian extraction during the latter part of the twentieth century, the plays reflect the outrage of the Armenian Genocide, the forced transplantation that created the Armenian Diaspora, and the desire to maintain the newly established democratic homeland. Including a range of authors from William Saroyan to more contemporary voices, this anthology represents the writers that have stimulated cutting-edge contemporary drama from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The collection includes farce, comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy (and sometimes blends of all of these). The plays reflect the shared experiences of Armenian family life in Armenia, Turkey, and America. The themes include the joy of freedom to practice their faith and ethnic customs, the turmoil of acculturation, and the feared loss of identity through assimilation. The editor has provided headnotes for each play and an extensive introduction tracing the history of Armenian American drama in the United States.