Literary Criticism : Drama

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works. Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright’s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O’Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath. According to Diggins, O’Neill mined this disjunction like no other American writer. His characters burn with longing for an idealized future composed of equal parts material success and individual freedom, but repeatedly they fall back to earth, pulled by the tendrils of family and the insatiability of desire. Drawing on thinkers from Emerson to Nietzsche, O’Neill viewed this endlessly frustrated desire as the problematic core of American democracy, simultaneously driving and undermining American ideals of progress, success, and individual freedom. Melding a penetrating assessment of O’Neill’s works and thought with a sensitive re-creation of his life, Eugene O’Neill’s America offers a striking new view of America’s greatest playwright—and a new picture of American democracy itself. more...

Price: $20.00

Attending to the dialogue between the comic events in plays by female writers of the 18th century and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political and legal arguements about women and marrige that fascinated the playwrights and the theatre-going public. more...

Price: $79.95

Frames of Mind provides a fresh and stimulating introduction to the world of Post-Jungian film and television studies. To orientate the reader the book starts with an overview of analytical psychology and how it has been used to analyze films. From that starting point it broadens out to include topics such as: why we have genuine emotional responses to films which we know to be unreal; how and why we watch television; the unconscious motifs of advertising; and the psychological role that technology plays in contemporary society. Film and television programmes considered in Frames of Mind include: Chinatown (Polanski) and Star Trek: The Next Generation. A number of television advertisements are also considered. This book will appeal to students, researchers, academics and practitioners interested in either media and, or, analytical psychology. more...

Price: $10.00

Alice Rayner examines theatre as a memorial practice that is haunted by the presence of loss, looking at how aspects of stagecraft turn familiar elements into something uncanny. Citing examples from the works of Shakespeare, Beckett, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as the films Vertigo, Gaslight, and The Sixth Sense, Rayner describes time as it is employed by theatre with multiple facets of presence, duration, and passage. more...

Price: $67.50

A collection of essays, by leading international scholars, on the history of the Greek theatre, and on the wider context of festival culture in which theatrical activity took place in the Greek world. The emphasis is on a fresh interpretation of the documentary material - inscriptions, archaeological remains, and monuments. - ;A collection of essays, by leading international scholars, on the history of the Greek theatre, and on the wider context of festival culture in which theatrical activity took place in the Greek world. The emphasis is on the documentary material - inscriptions, archaeological remains and monuments - which provides so much of our 'hard' evidence for the activities of the theatre. Much of the important material discussed here is unknown except to specialists, and these studies offer. access to its interpretation to a wider audience. They cover a wide range of time and place, from the earliest days of the Greek theatre to the Roman period, with special emphasis on the neglected Hellenistic period, which is especially rich in documentary evidence. - ;There is much of interest here for scholars in the world of Greek performance - Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Bryn Mawr Classical Review more...

Price: $150.00