Download or read book Lillian Hellman and August Wilson written by Margaret Booker and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2003 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically discusses the works of two seemingly different and unconnected playwrights, Lillian Hellman and August Wilson. By analyzing the black presence in Hellman and its counterpart white presence in Wilson, it exposes interracial boundaries and illuminates the architecture of the new American citizen through the examination of stereotypes, the revelation of sources of ongoing racial tension, and suggested solutions. Their dramas rewrite history to reflect their political activism and espouse a shared value system that demands responsible action, equitable reward, and recognition of women and African Americans as equally valuable citizens of American society.
Download or read book Conversations with Lillian Hellman written by Lillian Hellman and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1986 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-six interviews with the outspoken writer range over six decades of her life and career.
Download or read book Conversations with August Wilson written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"-- the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards--Publisher description.
Download or read book The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson written by Harry Justin Elam and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2009-05-21 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness. Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson written by Christopher Bigsby and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-29 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in another time and place, but doing something more than just survive. Wilson deliberately addressed black America, but in doing so discovered an international audience. Alongside chapters addressing Wilson's life and career, and the wider context of his plays, this Companion dedicates individual chapters to each play in his ten-play cycle, which are ordered chronologically, demonstrating Wilson's notion of an unfolding history of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Children s Hour written by Lillian Hellman and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1953 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serious play about two women who run a school for girls.
Download or read book Labyrinth of Hybridities written by Marc Maufort and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking its cue from Eugene O'Neill's questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O'Neill's questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama.
Download or read book August Wilson written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a brief biography of August Wilson along with extracts of major critical essays, plot summaries, and an index of themes and ideas.
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights written by Christopher Innes and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years. This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides: · a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works. Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.
Download or read book The Fourth Ghost written by Robert H. Brinkmeyer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1949 classic Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith described three racial "ghosts" haunting the mind of the white South: the black woman with whom the white man often had sexual relations, the rejected child from a mixed-race coupling, and the black mammy whom the white southern child first loves but then must reject. In this groundbreaking work, Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., extends Smith's work by adding a fourth "ghost" lurking in the psyche of the white South -- the specter of European Fascism. He explores how southern writers of the 1930s and 1940s responded to Fascism, and most tellingly to the suggestion that the racial politics of Nazi Germany had a special, problematic relevance to the South and its segregated social system. As Brinkmeyer shows, nearly all white southern writers in these decades felt impelled to deal with this specter and with the implications for southern identity of the issues raised by Nazism and Fascism. Their responses varied widely, ranging from repression and denial to the repulsion of self-recognition. With penetrating insight, Brinkmeyer examines the work of writers who contemplated the connection between the authoritarianism and racial politics of Nazi Germany and southern culture. He shows how white southern writers -- both those writing cultural criticism and those writing imaginative literature -- turned to Fascist Europe for images, analogies, and metaphors for representing and understanding the conflict between traditional and modern cultures that they were witnessing in Dixie. Brinkmeyer considers the works of a wide range of authors of varying political stripes: the Nashville Agrarians, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. He argues persuasively that by engaging in their works the vital contemporary debates about totalitarianism and democracy, these writers reconfigured their understanding not only of the South but also of themselves as southerners, and of the nature and significance of their art. The magnum opus of a distinguished scholar, The Fourth Ghost offers a stunning reassessment of the cultural and political orientation of southern literature by examining a major and heretofore unexplored influence on its development.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre written by Harvey Young and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-25 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of African American theatre, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Along the way, it chronicles the evolution of African American theatre and its engagement with the wider community, including discussions of slave rebellions on the national stage, African Americans on Broadway, the Harlem Renaissance, African American women dramatists, and the 'New Negro' and 'Black Arts' movements. Leading scholars spotlight the producers, directors, playwrights and actors whose efforts helped to fashion a more accurate appearance of black life on stage, and reveal the impact of African American theatre both within the United States and further afield. Chapters also address recent theatre productions in the context of political and cultural change and ask where African American theatre is heading in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Mouths on Fire with Songs written by Caroline De Wagter and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, the first cross-cultural study of post-1970s anglophone Canadian and American multi-ethnic drama, invites assessment of the thematic and aesthetic contributions of this theater in today’s globalized culture. A growing number of playwrights of African, South and East Asian, and First Nations heritage have engaged with manifold socio-political and aesthetic issues in experimental works combining formal features of more classical European dramatic traditions with such elements of ethnic culture as ancestral music and dance, to interrogate the very concepts of theatricality and canonicity. Their “mouths on fire” (August Wilson), these playwrights contest stereotyped notions of authenticity. In¬spired by songs of anger, passion, experience, survival, and regeneration, the plays analyzed bespeak a burning desire to break the silence, to heal and empower. Foregrounding questions of hybridity, diaspora, cultural memory, and nation, this comparative study includes discussion of some twenty-five case studies of plays by such authors as M.J. Kang, August Wilson, Suzan–Lori Parks, Djanet Sears, Chay Yew, Padma Viswanathan, Rana Bose, Diane Glancy, and Drew Hayden Taylor. Through its cross-cultural and cross-national prism, “Mouths on Fire with Songs” shows that multi-ethnic drama is one of the most diverse and dynamic sites of cultural production in North America today.
Download or read book Conversations with Thornton Wilder written by Thornton Wilder and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1992 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and playwright most widely known today for his play, Our Town
Download or read book Toys in the Attic written by Lillian Hellman and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 1960 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Length: 3 acts.
Download or read book American Culture in the 1980s written by Graham Thompson and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks beyond the common label of 'Ronald Reagan's America' to chart the complex intersection of cultures in the 1980s. In doing so it provides an insightful account of the major cultural forms of 1980s America - literature and drama; film and television; music and performance; art and photography - and influential texts and trends of the decade: from White Noise to Wall Street, from Silicon Valley to MTV, and from Madonna to Cindy Sherman. A focused chapter considers the changing dynamics of American culture in an increasingly globalised marketplace.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson written by Sandra G. Shannon and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and puts African American storytelling and performance practices in dialogue with canonical writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare. As they portray black Americans living through migration, industrialization, and war, Wilson's plays explore the relation between a unified black consciousness and America's collective identity. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey sources on Wilson's biography, teachable texts of Wilson's plays, useful secondary readings, and compelling audiovisual and Web resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," look at a diverse set of issues in Wilson's work, including the importance of blues and jazz, intertextual connections to other playwrights, race in performance, Yoruban spirituality, and the role of women in the plays.
Download or read book The Facts on File Companion to American Drama written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
