... of Misery. Popular culture as always is a lever to move the world, and people. As Suzan-Lori Parks’s play ing A opens at New York’s Public Theater, she dips her toe into a new genre with her first novel Getting Mother’s Body and into broader celebrity as she moves literally within sight...

... century. Cathy N. Davidson s Preface: No More Separate Spheres (AL 70: 443 63) is one. Moreover, after years in scholarship s closet, drama is forcing its way into PMLA and American Literature; Duke University Press has announced a new publication, Theater, edited by Erika Munk. The study of American...

... literature, this year produces books on popular media and postwar suburbs but not on American drama. Let us hope that these trends too, like some scholarly tastes, are transitory. Those books and articles that did make the cut this year are itemized herein. i Theater History The intent of Thomas S...

...James J. Martine Duke University Press 2002 19 Drama James J. Martine The first year of the millennium may prove to be a watershed in ways other than chronological. New York theater strains to bridge a chasm between two audiences, one mostly baby boomers and older who expect...

... and academic journal articles on mooks, mosh pits, Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine, Korn, Eminem, Vince McMahon, the World Wrestling Federation, and the XFL. This year’s distinctive debate, however, seems to shift to what constitutes live theater on Broadway...

... Television Culture from NYU, among others. The times they are a-changin’. i  Theater History Richard Christiansen’s Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago (Northwestern) starts in 1837, with a troupe of traveling actors including Joseph Jefferson staging the first...

... the heirs of Gertrude Stein—including Maria Irene Fórnes, Parks, and Richard Forman—who “question the very devices and means by which we create theater.” Some of those on her list were showcased in New Downtown Now (see AmLS 2006, pp. 439–40). Others include Adam Bock, Rinne Groff, Noah Haidle, Rob...

... as represented by this year’s New York theater seems stable: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney and The Man Who Had All the Luck with Chris O’Donnell; Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, 400...

...Dorothy Chansky; Jonathan Chambers Duke University Press 2010 19  Drama Dorothy Chansky and Jonathan Chambers Book publishing in American theater and drama—indeed about the- ater and drama, period—dropped precipitously in 2008. The groaning boards of the book display...

... maintaining the sort of only-in-the-theater chic one associates with, say, Philip Barry. Parks still irks African Americans who find her phonetic spelling, nonrealistic worlds, and abstract considerations of history to be irrelevant to “the black experience.” Sometimes it is strategically advis- able...

... Vergangenes, to misappropriate Hegel’s term a little.” If this combination of shift and respect is alarming to anyone in literary studies, it is a bit déjà-vu/ho-hum for scholars of drama and theater, or perhaps I should say for scholars of drama in theater, that slippery site where text...

...Dorothy Chansky; Jonathan Chambers Duke University Press 2011 19 Drama Dorothy Chansky and Jonathan Chambers For the second year in a row, significantly fewer books were published about American theater and drama than during the first two-thirds of the decade. No special topics...

...David K. Sauer; Geoffrey Sauer Copyright © 2022 Duke University Press 2022 gsauer@iastate.edu sauer@shc.edu 20 Drama David K. Sauer and Geoffrey Sauer Scholarship on drama and theater is constantly exploring new directions. Over a decade ago, for example, there was a notable...

... into seeing the intercon- nection of theater and philosophy in “Stages of Thought: Emerson, Maeterlinck, Glaspell” (MD 56: 457–77): “But what if ideas emerge, instead, from a dialogue between mind and object, the metaphysical and the physical? What if thinking requires an interaction with things...

... in American Theatre, 1890–1916(Palgrave) reveals the gaps between older and newer approaches to theater history. The main contribution of the study, like traditional history, lies in its linking of a set of relatively unknown plays that together constitute a view of slum life. Such a subject...

... the playtext to the same value as souvenirs sold at performances. This year’s works instead see drama as a means of contextualizing the historical image, photo, or event, supplying the meaning that might have been taken for granted and left to stand alone. In Spectacles of Reform: Theater...

... s understanding was seeing a Guthrie Theater revival in 2013 of O Neill s Long Day s Journey into Night that revealed itself to him as clear antecedent to Albee but with a new twist: Some- how this tragic living room drama was, totally unexpectedly to me going into the play, very funny. Bennett...

... in a “play,” thus freeing drama from connection with performance. Julia Fawcett, “The Unmarked Subject(s) in Gertrude Stein’s A Play Called Not and Now” (MD 53: 137–58), seeks to complicate Salvato’s thesis that Stein refers to the conventions of theater even as she deliber- ately “queers” them...

... embody “this most capitalistic set of values and activities.” Holtcamp links this to Philip Auslander’s Liveness and the argument that contemporary theater seeks to eliminate the individual performance and make uniform productions. Like the irony that a per- formance is unique yet replicatable...

... that affect psychological development and that cause Henry Fleming to become “another thing.” In a pedagogical study of Crane, “Tracing the Romance of Theater in Some ‘Classic’ Nineteenth Century Novels: A Didactic Proposal,” pp. 19–34 in Old Stories, New Readings, María Ángeles Toda Iglesia argues...