Understanding Contemporary American Drama

Understanding Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: William Herman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book

Book Description

Understanding Contemporary American Drama

Understanding Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: William Herman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book

Book Description


Contemporary American Drama

Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: Annette Saddik
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074863066X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Contemporary American Drama

Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: Annette J. Saddik
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780343488
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions.

Understanding Contemporary American Drama

Understanding Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: William Herman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description


Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama

Popular Culture Icons in Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: Konstantinos Blatanis
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838640081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction PDF Author: Darren Harris-Fain
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570035852
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 explores the major trends and developments during three decades that witnessed science fiction's most dramatic progression from subliterary escapist entertainment to a more sophisticated literature of ideas. Darren Harris-Fain suggests that to understand American science fiction fully, it is essential to realize that the current field with all its variety results from the proceeding decades of writings. In addition, he contends that although much science fiction of merit was written in America prior to 1970, the latter decades of the twentieth century witnessed a dramatic improvement in quality, even as the field fragmented into a variety of subgenres and as writers sought to transcend earlier critical dismissals. Harris-Fain discusses significant and representative works, most of which mainstream literary scholars and critics ignore, as he charts the historical and literary development of contemporary American science fiction. the internal divisions along both literary and political lines experienced during the Vietnam era; the influence of the feminist movement and other contemporary concerns; the increasing contributions of female, African American, and gay and lesbian writers; and the emergence of such significant trends as hard science fiction, cyberpunk, alternate history, and shared-world stories. Harris-Fain also considers literary science fiction's relationship to the mass media, the effects the popularity of fantasy has on the field, and academia's continued misprizing of the genre.

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory

Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory PDF Author: Michael Paul Spikes
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570034985
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book

Book Description
In this revised edition of Understanding Contemporary American Literary Theory, Michael P. Spikes adds Stanley Fish and Susan Bordo to the critics whose careers, key texts, and central assumptions he discusses in introducing readers to developments in American literary theory during the past thirty-five years. Underscoring the largely heterogeneous mix of strategies and suppositions that these critics, along with Paul de Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Edward W. Said, and Stephen Greenblatt, represent, Spikes offers concise analyses of their principal claims and illustrates how their works reflect a range of critical perspectives, from deconstruction, African American studies, and reader-response theory to political criticism, the new historicism, and feminism.

Essays on Contemporary American Drama

Essays on Contemporary American Drama PDF Author: Hedwig Bock
Publisher: Munich : M. Hueber
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book

Book Description


Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama

Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama PDF Author: Margaret Hallissy
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611176638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Get Book

Book Description
A study of the key themes and events essential to understanding Irish fiction and drama In Understanding Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama, Margaret Hallissy examines the work of a cross-section of important Irish writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who are representative of essential issues and themes in the canon of contemporary Irish literature. Included are early figures John Millington Synge and James Joyce; dramatists Brian Friel, Conor McPherson, and Tom Murphy; and prize-winning contemporary fiction writers such as Edna O'Brien, Joseph O'Connor, William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, and Colum McCann. Each chapter focuses on one significant representative piece of contemporary Irish fiction or drama by filling in its cultural, historical, and literary background. Hallissy identifies a key theme or key event in the Irish past essential to understanding the work. She then analyzes earlier literary compositions with the same theme and through a close reading of the contemporary work provides context for that background. The chapters are organized chronologically by relevant historical events, with thematic discussions interspersed. Background pieces were chosen for their places in Irish literature and the additional insight they provide into the featured works.

Dramatic Structure in the Contemporary American Theatre

Dramatic Structure in the Contemporary American Theatre PDF Author: Robert Andreach
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1938288343
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description
In this follow-up to his 2012 The Contemporary American Dramatic Trilogy, Robert J. Andreach continues his unique study of dramatic structure as evidenced through the overarching themes of contemporary American trilogies. The themes of the first play in a trilogy, he shows, can be far different from those developed as the sequence continues, citing examples from playwrights as varied as David Rabe and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Quiara Alegráa Hudes. Looking at the ways structure in a tragedy can be substituted for the Aristotelian plot, Andreach makes clear that because creating or reinventing oneself can be such a primary motivating force in American culture, a character's failed attempt to change the structure or plot of his or her life may indeed be tragic. The dramatic trilogy has been flourishing for some time now in new works and revivals of older ones by American, British, and European playwrights, with examples such as the Hunger Games trilogy and the Fifty Shades trilogy moving more recently even into the popular sphere. Combining his skills as both a professional reviewer of theater and a literary critic, Robert Andreach is in a unique position to provide coherence to what most observers perceive as an unrelated welter of contemporary theatrical experiences.