This engrossing book presents the first collection in more than three decades of one of America’s finest drama critics. Richard Gilman chronicles a major period in American theater history, one that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, regional theater, nonprofit companies, and avant-garde performance, as well as growing interest in plays by women and minorities and in world drama. His writing, however, is more than a revealing look at an era. It is criticism for the ages.
Textual Subjectivity - The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics
This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics--not how they express the subjectivity of individuals, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes analyses of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many anonymous poems.
Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama explores the intertextual conversations and palimpsestuous relations between modern and contemporary European dramatists such as Alan Bennett, Elfriede Jelinek, Milan Kundera, Heiner Muller, and Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, and canonical texts by novelists and dramatists including Choderlos de Laclos, Denis Diderot, Henrik Ibsen, and Franz Kafka. Witkiewicz and Jelinek represent avant-garde subversions and transgressions of Ibsen's theatrical naturalism.
Principles of Tragedy - A Rational Examination of the Tragic Concept in Life and Literature
This book originated in a search for a definition either of tragedy or of the main tragic elements which would hold good on various planes and over a wide range of literature and drama. It seemed that if the term 'tragic' had any validity at all when used by a modern commentator it ought to include factors common at least to Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, and probably Ibsen and others, irrespective of the difference in their historical and ethical backgrounds. The simple conviction that this should be so runs into truly formidable objections, but the author eventually reached the conclusion that they are not insurmountable providing one confines oneself to essentials.
One of today's most important novelists, Cormac McCarthy is at the peak of a long and productive career. The film adaptation of his No Country for Old Men is a major motion picture, and his fiction is widely read in book clubs. This volume looks at his works, characters, themes, and contexts and relates his writings to current events and popular culture. Chapters include sidebars of interesting information, along with questions to stimulate book club discussions and student research.
