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Beth Henley's twelve complete plays (three of which have been turned into films) have achieved worldwide production. At age 29, she produced her first full-length drama, Crimes of the Heart, which won a Pulitzer Prize and garnered three Academy Award nominations as a film. Her Mississippi upbringing and her penchant for the eccentricities of southern culture, however, have caused critics to categorize her writing as a kind of southern gothic folklore inspired by feminist ideology. This book, the first critical study of Henley's complete plays, attempts to dispel the common stereotypes that associate Henley's work with regional drama and sociological treatises. It argues instead that Henley c...
This work reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. It traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen" to contemporary dramatists such as Sam Shepard.
Beth Henley was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for her first full-length play, Crimes of the Heart, yet there has been no book-length consideration of her body of work until now. This volume includes original essays that contextualize and analyze her works from a variety of perspectives, focusing on her vexed status as a southern writer, her use of the comic grotesque, and her alleged feminist critiques of modern society. Receiving special attention are lesser-known plays which are crucial to understanding Henley's development as a playwright and postmodern thinker.
Born in 1915 to barely literate Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Alfred Kazin rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and one of Americas last great men of letters. Biographer Ri
This lively socio-cultural history examines household service, one of the largest, multi-layered, mobile and most indispensable sectors of employment in early modern England. Drawing on a wide variety of cultural sources including literary depiction and self-representation, this study brings into sharp focus individual life stories of Britain’s servant class. Exploring the relationships between servants and between employers and servants; it depicts the differences between patterns of employment in London and the provinces, and the juxtaposition of servant vulnerability and servant power. This book places new importance on the household servant as a major agent in cultural change and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of servitude in London and the provinces in the two centuries following the Reformation.
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This is a comprehensive survey of women's drama between the Renaissance and the end of the 18th century, assessing the plays' characteristic features and the ruptures in the text that indicate the writers' precarious social and artistic position and the ambiguous stances to their own creativity and sex. Chapters are devoted to individual writers as well as to general developments in specific periods. The most significant plays are analysed in detail and related to the male literary canon of the time in order to stress both their originality and the existence of an, albeit tentative, female literary canon.