Edited by Brenda Murphy
William Dean Howells has long been recognized as the chief spokesman for post-1880s American Realism. Most of his writing appeared in popular magazines, however, and has been lost to us. This collection brings together for the first time his most significant essays about American drama written between 1875 and 1919 and a full bibliography of his writings on drama and theatre. The essays have been generously annotated and provide production and publication information on the plays Howells reviewed and biographical notes on the playwrights and actors whose work he described.
Howells’s commentary, the most literate treatment of American theatre of the time, defines and defends his theory of the evolutionary development of realism in modern drama. Because he reviewed more than on hundred fifty productions, which represent the full range of theatre that was available to him, his insights are based on invaluable first-hand knowledge of both self-consciously literary drama and the popular forms of performance that were central to America’s entertainment before World War I. Howells’s essays had a powerful influence on the serious playwrights and theatre practitioners who came of age at the turn of the century, and whose work in turn enabled playwrights like Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell to develop a new realism during the teens.
The essays in this volume are the core of Howells’s theory of dramatic realism and will be interesting to scholars, students, and teachers of theatre history and literary criticism.
Brenda Murphy is the author of American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987), Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (Cambridge, 1992), and, with George Monteiro, the editor of John Hay—Howells Letters (Twayne, 1980). She is professor of English at the University of Connecticut. More info →
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978-0-8214-1036-3
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Release date: September 1992
256 pages
Rights: World
New and Selected Poems
By James Schevill
From a poetic career that spans more than half a century and that is still producing poems as fresh and honest as the first, comes James Schevill’s New and Selected Poems, redefining the achievement of this uniquely American vision.Schevill’s poetry, acclaimed and criticized, has been rigorously selected here by the poet himself down to the best and most representative of his significant output.
Sight Unseen
Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio
By Elissa S. Guralnick
In Sight Unseen radio drama, a genre traditionally dismissed as popular culture, is celebrated as high art. The radio plays discussed here range from the conventional (John Arden’s Pearl) to the docudramatic (David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement), from the curtly conversational (Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache) to the virtually operatic (Robert Ferguson’s Transfigured Night), testifying to radio drama’s variety and literary stature.
Theater - History and Criticism · Radio - History and Criticism · Literary Criticism · American Literature · British Literature · Literature
5 Plays 5
Lovecraft’s Follies, The Ushers, Mother O, Shadows of Memory, The Last Romantics
By James Schevill
In 1970 Adrian Hall’s production of Lovecraft’s Follies by the Trinity Repertory Company was praised in The New York Times as a “hilarious extravaganza—with music—that is also an earnest attempt to come to grips with the guilts and terrors of the Age of Technology.” The sucess of this production heralded James Schevill’s arrival as an important American playwright dedicated to a new kind of theatre that he calls in the introduction to this book, “Poetic Realism.”
Literature · Literary Criticism, Theater · American Literature
