Download or read book The Routledge Introduction to American Drama written by Paul Thifault and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-29 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book American Drama and the Postmodern written by and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Technology in American Drama 1920 1950 written by Dennis G. Jerz and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2003-03-30 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre written by Julia A. Walker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-06-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although often dismissed as a minor offshoot of the better-known German movement, expressionism on the American stage represents a critical phase in the development of American dramatic modernism. Situating expressionism within the context of early twentieth-century American culture, Walker demonstrates how playwrights who wrote in this mode were responding both to new communications technologies and to the perceived threat they posed to the embodied act of meaning. At a time when mute bodies gesticulated on the silver screen, ghostly voices emanated from tin horns, and inked words stamped out the personality of the hand that composed them, expressionist playwrights began to represent these new cultural experiences by disarticulating the theatrical languages of bodies, voices and words. In doing so, they not only innovated a new dramatic form, but redefined playwriting from a theatrical craft to a literary art form, heralding the birth of American dramatic modernism.
Download or read book Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama written by David Palmer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-08 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume responds to a renewed focus on tragedy in theatre and literary studies to explore conceptions of tragedy in the dramatic work of seventeen canonical American playwrights. For students of American literature and theatre studies, the assembled essays offer a clear framework for exploring the work of many of the most studied and performed playwrights of the modern era. Following a contextual introduction that offers a survey of conceptions of tragedy, scholars examine the dramatic work of major playwrights in chronological succession, beginning with Eugene O'Neill and ending with Suzan-Lori Parks. A final chapter provides a study of American drama since 1990 and its ongoing engagement with concepts of tragedy. The chapters explore whether there is a distinctively American vision of tragedy developed in the major works of canonical American dramatists and how this may be seen to evolve over the course of the twentieth century through to the present day. Among the playwrights whose work is examined are: Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Marsha Norman and Tony Kushner. With each chapter being short enough to be assigned for weekly classes in survey courses, the volume will help to facilitate critical engagement with the dramatic work and offer readers the tools to further their independent study of this enduring theme of dramatic literature.
Download or read book Contemporary Armenian American Drama written by Nishan Parlakian and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-19 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Contemporary American Drama written by Annette Saddik and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-09-13 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups. Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity and questions the nature of reality.
Download or read book The Absent Father in Modern Drama written by Paul Rosefeldt and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the Freudians to the feminists, the role of the absent or hidden father figure has played a part in narrative and cultural theory. This work presents the first full-length examination of the absent father in modern drama. It closely analyzes major works by Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Williams, Miller, Shepard, Rabe, Henley, Norman, Pielmeier, Shaffer, Osborne, Churchill, and Fugard. Using the critical framework of psychological, deconstructive, and myth criticism, this book demonstrates how the consistent focus on an imposing father figure who never physically appears onstage affects the psychological, social, and metaphysical structure of major modern dramas."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Federal Theatre Project in the American South written by Cecelia Moore and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Federal Theatre Project in the American South introduces the people and projects that shaped the regional identity of the Federal Theatre Project. When college theatre director Hallie Flanagan became head of this New Deal era jobs program in 1935, she envisioned a national theatre comprised of a network of theatres across the country. A regional approach was more than organizational; it was a conceptual model for a national art. Flanagan was part of the little theatre movement that had already developed a new American drama drawn from the distinctive heritage of each region and which they believed would, collectively, illustrate a national identity. The Federal Theatre plan relied on a successful regional model – the folk drama program at the University of North Carolina, led by Frederick Koch and Paul Green. Through a unique partnership of public university, private philanthropy and community participation, Koch had developed a successful playwriting program and extension service that built community theatres throughout the state. North Carolina, along with the rest of the Southern region, seemed an unpromising place for government theatre. Racial segregation and conservative politics limited the Federal Theatre’s ability to experiment with new ideas in the region. Yet in North Carolina, the Project thrived. Amateur drama units became vibrant community theatres where whites and African Americans worked together. Project personnel launched The Lost Colony, one of the first so-called outdoor historical dramas that would become its own movement. The Federal Theatre sent unemployed dramatists, including future novelist Betty Smith, to the university to work with Koch and Green. They joined other playwrights, including African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who came to North Carolina because of their own interest in folk drama. Their experience, told in this book, is a backdrop for each successive generation’s debates over government, cultural expression, art and identity in the American nation.
Download or read book African American Theatre written by Samuel A. Hay and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-03-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of African American theatre from its beginnings to the present.
Download or read book The Musical as Drama written by H. Scott McMillin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-12 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Derived from the colorful traditions of vaudeville, burlesque, revue, and operetta, the musical has blossomed into America's most popular form of theater. Scott McMillin has developed a fresh aesthetic theory of this underrated art form, exploring the musical as a type of drama deserving the kind of critical and theoretical regard given to Chekhov or opera. Until recently, the musical has been considered either an "integrated" form of theater or an inferior sibling of opera. McMillin demonstrates that neither of these views is accurate, and that the musical holds true to the disjunctive and irreverent forms of popular entertainment from which it arose a century ago. Critics and composers have long held the musical to the standards applied to opera, asserting that each piece should work together to create a seamless drama. But McMillin argues that the musical is a different form of theater, requiring the suspension of the plot for song. The musical's success lies not in the smoothness of unity, but in the crackle of difference. While disparate, the dancing, music, dialogue, and songs combine to explore different aspects of the action and the characters. Discussing composers and writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern, The Musical as Drama describes the continuity of this distinctively American dramatic genre, from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s to the musicals of today.
Download or read book A Companion to American Literature written by Susan Belasco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-04-03 with total page 1864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.
Download or read book Theatre Culture in America 1825 1860 written by Rosemarie K. Bank and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-28 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of pre-Civil War American theatre.
Download or read book A Study of Sophoclean Drama written by Gordon MacDonald Kirkwood and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study in the dramatic methods of Sophocles, especially in the revelation of character, as the primary essence of Sophocles' art.
Download or read book Theater of the Mind written by Neil Verma and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For generations, fans and critics have characterized classic American radio drama as a “theater of the mind.” This book unpacks that characterization by recasting the radio play as an aesthetic object within its unique historical context. In Theater of the Mind, Neil Verma applies an array of critical methods to more than six thousand recordings to produce a vivid new account of radio drama from the Depression to the Cold War. In this sweeping exploration of dramatic conventions, Verma investigates legendary dramas by the likes of Norman Corwin, Lucille Fletcher, and Wyllis Cooper on key programs ranging from The Columbia Workshop, The Mercury Theater on the Air, and Cavalcade of America to Lights Out!, Suspense, and Dragnet to reveal how these programs promoted and evolved a series of models of the imagination. With close readings of individual sound effects and charts of broad trends among formats, Verma not only gives us a new account of the most flourishing form of genre fiction in the mid-twentieth century but also presents a powerful case for the central place of the aesthetics of sound in the history of modern experience.
Download or read book American Drama written by Susan Harris Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revisionist study of the cultural neglect of American drama.
Download or read book Notes from a Black Woman s Diary written by Kathleen Collins and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Relatively unknown during her life, the artist, filmmaker, and writer Kathleen Collins emerged on the literary scene in 2016 with the posthumous publication of the short-story collection Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? Said Zadie Smith, “To be this good and yet to be ignored is shameful, but her rediscovery is a great piece of luck for us.” That rediscovery continues in Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, which spans genres to reveal the breadth and depth of the late author’s talent. The compilation is anchored by more of Collins’s striking short stories, which explore the ways in which relationships both are formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage, including the screenplay of her pioneering film Losing Ground and the script for The Brothers, which powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African American experience. And finally, it is in Collins’s raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary is a brilliant compendium of the works of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.
