... applied by her nut brown maid (actually Grace Burgess in blackface). By faithfully reproducing Lorelei s whiteness and consumerism, [June] Walker projected both a beauty and modernity that distanced her image from the nonwhite, working-class characters that characterized her early career. e cleverness...

..., marked by Joyce McDonald s book The Stu of Our Forebears: Willa Cather s Southern Heritage. Critics of both Wharton and Cather are increasingly preoc- cupied with analyzing the ambivalence or the conflicting attitudes that they see in the novelists portrayal of characters in multiracial, class-based...

... Levine sees analogies between characters’ accommodation to social codes and Wharton’s acceptance of restrictions still imposed on writers in the 1920s. Levine gives particular attention to Newland Archer’s reading of European books, which intensify his sense of entrapment and encourage escape...

...Ždence-Man ’s cosmopolitan, a character whose ‘‘job in the narra- tive is to test the faith of the other characters.’ ’ Sten concludes that cosmopolitanism is ‘‘a deŽning activity of the imagination for Melville Bryan C. Short’s ‘‘Melville’ s Memory pp. 299–309 in Melville...

... my plays can be so emotionally truthful that they break through that impenetrable shell of narcissism that characterizes the contemporary American and deliver them over to the tragic core of their vulnerability. As Bigsby observes, Shinn s concern here is not his characters but his audience: David K...

... Register (Macmillan), goes beyond earlier studies in showing how Wharton trans- formed social codes and conventions into narrative strategies for the construction of character and plot. Incisive analyses of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country, and The Age of Innocence reveal the innumerable...

... intellectual . . . guide, philosopher and moral conscience.” Paralysis (a word occurring at least 90 times in the book) is a symptom of the difficulty Miller’s characters face (or avoid) if they are to honor the basic human contract, for which Bigsby’s shorthand is “There is no immunity...

...) (Nathaniel Hawthorne Review [NHR] 46: 174 85) offers a close, productive examination of ekphrasis, the verbal depiction and/or interpretation of an artistic image, either real or imagined, a rhetorical trope Hawthorne employed throughout his career. Particularly in his early work his characters...

... about the availability of stage life in general.” What characterizes O’Neill’s dramaturgy for Robinson is that “instead of making his characters more familiar over the course of a production . . . and sinking their roots ever more deeply into their milieus, he erodes them until they nearly blow...

... and those attempts to recreate it in historical and contemporary performances.” This sense of doubleness reveals a new approach to the auction of the white woman revealed to have slave blood in Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859). “The near-whiteness of characters like Zoe Peyton is crucial,” according...

...- den examines two richly suggestive examples of idiosyncratic a ective experience, Benjy Compson in Faulkner s e Sound and the Fury and Frankie Addams in McCullers s e Member of the Wedding, arguing that these characters provide an alternative to characterization based in self-re exive subjectivity...

... emerges when the ghosts of memory, theater history, and modernity converge in the ‘phantom note’ of performance.” Potentially a fascinating study of the influence of dead characters on the living is S. M. Mahfouz’s “The Presence of Absence: Catalytic and Omnipresent Offstage Characters in Modern...

... Realism to Abstraction” (StHum 31: 92–98) Peter L. Hays exam- ines Steinbeck’s three novelette-plays, Burning Bright, Of Mice and Men, and The Moon Is Down, written in an effort to make reading or view- ing drama more like reading a novella, although his characters are less realistic and more like...

... no major mono- graph on either Suzan-Lori Parks or Wendy Wasserstein. Yet, as Alexis Soloski has pointed out, we live in a very good time for playwrights, and not just those of the O’Neill/Miller/Williams sort who emphasize plot and character. Rather, Soloski sees an explosion of creativity among...

... (only Rachel Crothers and Lillian Hellman come to mind). Parks’s Fuck- ing A, despite its insouciant Brechtianism, its wild but moving character construction, its compassion for the poor, and its author’s Pulitzer (for the 2002 Topdog/Underdog), is off-limits even in putatively modern...

... concludes, What he revealed was the humor, overlooked in the no-holds-barred verbal slugfest between the central characters. Similarly, John Clum observes, It can be funny Who s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a very funny play when done right. The wide disparity of responses reveals the depth, richness...

... values and diversity of African-American communities’’ when he portrays the lack of adequate black male role models in the lives of characters such as Bigger Thomas. In ‘‘ What Bigger Killed For: Rereading Violence Against Women in Native Son’’ (TSLL 43: 169–93) Sondra Guttman contrasts Wright’s...

..., character, setting, and irony; she then devotes chapters to the Great Depression, agricultural history, the 1930s migrant farmworker, unionism and labor strikes, and capitalistic lawlessness. Going beyond Steinbeck’s own era, Johnson also comments on post-World War II farm labor and the rise of César...

... establishes the grounds for comparison of these New York writers of Anglo-Dutch ancestry in their portrayal of characters whose spiritual isolation calls into question the relative values of ‘‘self- reliance vs. social compliance To develop her thesis that Wharton and Melville ‘‘share a way of seeing...

... be- tween the readers of a novel and characters observing themselves and others within the novel, Hochman sees reected in the di Verent re- sponses to Lily Bart’s tableau Wharton’s own ambivalence about self- disclosure. In The Age of Innocence May Welland Archer, ‘‘an authorial Žgure...