Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle

Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle PDF Author: Doris Alexander
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.

Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle

Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle PDF Author: Doris Alexander
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041021
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle, Doris Alexander gives us a new kind of inside biography that begins where the others leave off. It follows O'Neill through the door into his writing room to give a blow-by-blow account of how he fought out in his plays his great life battles&—love against hate, doubt against belief, life against death&—to an ever-expanding understanding. It presents a new kind of criticism, showing how O'Neill's most intimate struggles worked their way to resolution through the drama of his plays. Alexander reveals that he was engineering his own consciousness through his plays and solving his life problems&—while the tone, imagery, and richness of the plays all came out of the nexus of memories summoned up by the urgency of the problems he faced in them. By the way of O'Neill, this study moves toward a theory of the impulse that sets off a writer's creativity, and a theory of how that impulse acts to shape a work, not only in a dramatist like O'Neill but also in the case of writers in other mediums, and even of painters and composers. The study begins with Desire Under the Elms because that play's plot was consolidated by a dream that opened up the transfixing grief that precipitated the play for O'Neill, and it ends with Days Without End when he had resolved his major emotional-philosophical struggle and created within himself the voice of his final great plays. Since the analysis brings to bear on the plays all of his conscious decisions, ideas, theories, as well as the life-and-death struggles motivating them, documenting even the final creative changes made during rehearsals, this book provides a definitive account of the nine plays analyzed in detail (Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed, Strange Interlude, Dynamo, Mourning Becomes Electra, Ah, Wilderness!, and Days Without End, with additional analysis of plays written before and after.

Hughie

Hughie PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
ISBN: 9780822205432
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
THE STORY: Originally produced on Broadway, revived to sellout houses in 1996 starring Al Pacino, HUGHIE was one of O'Neill's last works. It was originally intended as part of a series of short plays, but it became the lone survivor when O'Neill de

Eugene O'Neill's Last Plays

Eugene O'Neill's Last Plays PDF Author: Doris Alexander
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820327099
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This study draws on research concerning the lives of Eugene O'Neill, his family and his circle. It corrects and expands the biographical record on him and distinguishes the man and his life from the creations that were inspired by, and drew on, that life. Included are his attempted suicide, his tuberculosis, and his relationship with his parents.

Complete Plays: 1913-1920

Complete Plays: 1913-1920 PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

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Book Description
A wire for Live, the Web, thirst, recklessness, warnings, fog, bread and butter, Bound East for Cardiff, aAbortion, the movie man, servitude, the sniper, the personal eqauation, before breakfast, now I ask you, in the zone, ile, the long voyage home, the moon of the caribbees, the robe, beyond the horizon, shell shock, the dreamy kid, where the cross is made, the straw, Chris Christophersen, gold, anna Christie, and the Emperor Jones.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

Long Day's Journey Into Night PDF Author: Eugene O'Neill
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300190182
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
divEugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as his masterpiece and a classic of American drama. With this new edition, at last it has the critical edition that it deserves. William Davies King provides students and theater artists with an invaluable guide to the text, including an essay on historical and critical perspectives; glosses of literary allusions and quotations; notes on the performance history; an annotated bibliography; and illustrations. "This is a worthy new edition, one that I'm sure will appeal to many students and teachers. William Davies King provides a thoughtful introduction to Long Day's Journey into Night—equally sensitive to the most particular and most encompassing of the play's materials."—Marc Robinson/DIV

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre

Eugene O'Neill's Philosophy of Difficult Theatre PDF Author: Jeremy Killian
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780367519209
Category : Tragedy
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"Eugene O'Neill often characterized himself as a psychologist, asserting that "authors were psychologists...and profound ones, before psychology was invented." Though many of O'Neill's plays do reflect insights derived from early psychoanalytic method, contemporary students of psychology might bristle at O'Neil's characterization of his capacity to observe and describe the human condition. It might be better to characterize the so-called Father of American Tragedy as a kind of arm-chair philosopher, and this book attempts such a task. Through a close re- examination of Eugene O'Neill's oeuvre, from minor plays to his Pulitzer-winning works, this study proposes that O'Neill's philosophy of tragedy, though derivative of the larger Western approach to dramatic art, offers a unique account of why tragedy matters in today's world. In addition to offering a new paradigm through which to interpret O'Neill's work, this book argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is a robust description of the value of difficult theatre, with more explanatory scope and power than its historical counterparts. This volume enters the discussion of tragic value by way of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and through this study, Killian makes the case that O'Neill refused to allow Plato to define the terms of tragedy's merit, as most Western theorists have. He argues that O'Neill's theory of tragedy is non-cognitive and locates the value of a play not in what we learn from it, but rather in its ability to make us feel emotions that are difficult to come by in everyday experience. This book is significant for students and scholars of performance studies, literature, and philosophy"--

By Women Possessed

By Women Possessed PDF Author: Arthur Gelb
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698170687
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 922

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Book Description
Celebrated for their books on Eugene O’Neill and enjoying access to a trove of previously sealed archival material, the Gelbs deliver their final volume on the stormy life and brilliant oeuvre of this Nobel Prize–winning American playwright. This is a tour through both a magical moment in American theater and the troubled life of a genius. Not a peep show or a celebrity gossip fest, this book is a brilliant investigation of the emotional knots that ensnared one of our most important playwrights. Handsome, charming when he wanted to be: O’Neill was the flame women were drawn to—all, that is, except his mother, who never let him forget he was unwanted. By Women Possessed follows O’Neill through his great successes, the failures he was able to shrug off, and the long eclipse, a twelve-year period in which, despite the Nobel, nothing he wrote was produced. But ahead lay his greatest achievements: The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night. Both were ahead of their time and both received lukewarm receptions. It wasn’t until after his death that his widow, the keeper of the flame, began a fierce and successful campaign to restore his reputation. The result is that today, just over 125 years after his birth, O’Neill is a towering presence in the theater, his work—always in performance here and abroad—still electrifying audiences. Perhaps of equal importance, he is the acknowledged father of modern American theater, the man who paved the way for the likes of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and a host of others. But, as Williams has said, at a cost: “O’Neill gave birth to the American theater and died for it.”

Contour in Time

Contour in Time PDF Author: Travis Bogard
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195053419
Category : Dramatists, American
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This study attempts to trace Eugene O'Neill's theatrical contour from its origin to its end, by discussing each of his works in the approximate chronological order of composition. The book is thus a form of biography, although it pays no heed to those events of O'Neill's life that did not have direct bearing on his professional career. By virtue of O'Neill's central position in the drama of the modern world, this study also has become, within the limits its subject sets for it, a form of theatrical history. An appendix contains a complete factual record of important productions of O'Neill's plays. ISBN 0-19-504548-3 (pbk.): $12.95.

Eugene O'Neill's Last Four Plays: An Interpretation

Eugene O'Neill's Last Four Plays: An Interpretation PDF Author: Hans Eugene Feldmann
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description


Eugene O'Neill

Eugene O'Neill PDF Author: Stephen A. Black
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300093995
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 606

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Book Description
Stricken with guilt and grief when his father, mother and brother died in quick succession, Eugene O'Neill mourned deeply for two decades. This critical biography presents an understanding of O'Neill's life, work and slow grieving.