A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama: Volume Two: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee

1986 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 123
Author(s):  
Rodney Simard ◽  
C. W. E. Bigsby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
American Drama

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 505-526
Author(s):  
Eileen J. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
American Drama ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Rachel Crothers ◽  
Susan Glaspell

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

scholarly journals Paula Vogel And The Modern American Female Playwrights

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (44) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Rasha Abdulmunem Azeez ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
August Strindberg ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
Paula Vogel

Reading and analyzing Paula Vogel’s plays, the readers can attest that she achieves success in drama or theater because she is passionate about theater. Vogel is a modern American playwright who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her success and insight in playwriting or in adapting do not come all of a sudden; she is influenced by many writers. Vogel is influenced by many American dramatists, including Eugene O’ Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee, and by other non-American writers, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekhove, and Bertolt Brecht. Certainly, there were female playwrights who wrote preeminent plays and they influence Vogel as well. Nevertheless, dramas by female writers, as a matter of fact, remain marginalized. This paper focuses on the influence of some female playwrights on Vogel.

scholarly journals In Defense of American Drama

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (10) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Salim Eflih Al-Ibia
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
American Drama ◽  
Nobel Prizes ◽  
Nobel Laureates ◽  
Susan Glaspell ◽  
Shed Light

<p>A colleague of mine claimed that he read somewhere that a former secretary of the Swedish Institute, which awards the Nobel prizes— commented that American writers were less likely to win the award since their work was isolated and not representative of universal experience. But Eugene O’Neil and other American playwrights were named Nobel Laureates. Thus, I write this article in defense of the universality of American drama. Beginning with a discussion of what might be regarded as defining elements of universality as it has been rendered in literature, and more specifically how it operates to make drama relevant and significant for world literature, I examine the work of prominent American playwrights as Arthur Miller, O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Susan Glaspell, and Edward Albee. I argue that their work establishes a precedent for American drama as a particularly representative expression of aspects of a universal human condition. I relate their work to universal contexts. I shed light on the historical background of some of the plays discussed to argue that American writers are no less talented than other international playwrights who dramatized some historical precedents in their work and their plays present no less universal aspects. </p>

Tennessee Williams’s Misunderstood ‘memory play’: Re-Imagining Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie

2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-493
Author(s):  
Ramón Espejo Romero
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Search For Meaning ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Work ◽  
Glass Menagerie ◽  
The Glass Menagerie

Abstract Tennessee Williams famously called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play’. This remark has been consistently overlooked or misinterpreted by critics, unleashing a tradition of approaching the play in a rather confusing fashion concerning who the characters are and how the playwright uses them. This paper engages with the character of Amanda. First of all, I will trace major transformations in the conception of characters throughout twentieth-century drama, providing background for Williams’s attempt to redefine major aspects of a playwright’s craft such as what a ‘character’ is. Secondly, I will survey a critical tradition surrounding Tom Wingfield’s mother and consider major views concerning the character. Recurrent in them, as my analysis indicates, is the failure to acknowledge her as a tool for the ‘memory work’ Tom carries out. The character is subsequently posited as a fluid entity that helps Tom (and Williams) make sense of the past and explore how their families shaped who they were. As opposed to a realistic play, where so much is given at the start, a ‘memory play’, as Williams seems to have conceived it, remains a cry for the reader to join the playwright in a common search for meaning, one that utilizes, rather than just displays, characters in order to reach standpoints that are far from fixed and immutable.

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