Contemporary American theatre re-creates and invokes classical theatre so as to generate interaction between the two theatres. Using selected works of fourteen playwrights, this book organizes the interaction into three sections: works dramatizing change and reconciliation, works dramatizing the inability or the unwillingness to change and reconcile, and works emphasizing various selves (personal, theatrical, national).

How have twentieth-century writers used techniques in fiction to communicate the human experience of time? Dramatizing Time in Twentieth-Century Fiction explores this question by analyzing major narratives of the last century that demonstrate how time becomes variously manifested to reflect and illuminate its operation in our lives.
Offering close readings of both modernist and non-modernist writers such as Wodehouse, Stein, Lewis, Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, Borges, and Nabokov, the author shares and unifies the belief, as set forth by the distinguished philosopher Paul Ricoeur, that narratives rather than philosophy best help us understand time.