Offers a collection of classic plays by such women writers as Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Alice Childress, and Clare Boothe.

Offers a collection of classic plays by such women writers as Lillian Hellman, Gertrude Stein, Alice Childress, and Clare Boothe.

Traces the contributions of women to the American theater and offers the texts of five plays that deal with a sick child, a murdered husband, and family life

Traces the contributions of women to the American theater and offers the texts of five plays that deal with a sick child, a murdered husband, and family life

"Women writing for the stage today are the heirs of a neglected but not negligible tradition. This anthology brings together for the first time five of the best plays written by America's 'forgotten' women playwrights before 1930. Fasion is a social comedy that brilliantly satirizes the status-hungry nouveau riche of urban America; A Man's World examines the working woman's domain and the injustice of the double standard; Trifles is a perfectly constructed short play about a woman accused of murdering her husband; Miss Lulu Bett, the first play by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, is about a single woman who becomes virtually enslaved by her family; and Machinal portrays a young woman trapped in a materialistic machine age. This outstanding collection of plays explores the choices and changes that have challenged women for generations--through five fresh, timeless voices."--Back cover.

"In this exciting new anthology, Wesley Brown and Aimée K. Michel bring together six wonderfully teachable plays by some of the greatest American women dramatists of the past fifty years-- Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, Beth Henley, and Susan Yankowitz. The editors provide a helpful Introduction to the last 100 years of theatrical activity, from suffrage and anti-lynching plays, through the explosive 1960s, to recent Broadway triumphs, highlighting women's struggle-a struggle that continues--to put their vision and voices on the American stage." Elin Diamond, Rutgers University, USA This volume celebrates the iconoclastic power of six American women playwrights who pushed the boundaries of the form outside the box of conventional drama. Each play is accompanied by a short introduction providing the biographical background of the playwright as well as discussing the dramatic style of her writing, the extent to which her work is informed by major playwrights of the period, and how the specific work illustrates the overarching themes of her body of work. The plays included are: Gun by Susan Yankowitz Spell #7: geechee jibara quik magic trance manual for technologically stressed third world people by Ntozake Shange The Jacksonian by Beth Henley The Baltimore Waltz by Paula Vogel In the Blood by Suzan-Lori Parks Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage

This volume explores the convergences and divergences of American Studies today, and, more specifically, investigates how this discipline might be approached. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives, the essays brought together here address concerns related to the role and capacity of American Studies in the early 21st century, amidst alarming circumstances of environmental, economic, and educational degradation in a world characterized by a transnational flux of people, money, and cultures. Since its inception in the 1930s, the field of American Studies has been continuously examining its own disciplinary concepts, methodological approaches, and geographic assumptions. This book responds to calls for an open and critical discussion, offering a multifaceted image of the current approaches to American Studies as a complex and rapidly evolving discipline. The authors of the articles included here are academics and junior researchers who share their investigations and perceptions, ranging from linguistics, literature, economic history, Marx’s ideas, social theory, diasporic narratives, memory, trauma, gender issues, and teaching to popular culture-related phenomena and class-passing in ex-Yugoslavia against the background of the American Dream. The diverse and far-ranging representation of texts in this volume reflects the inseparability and confluence of different research interests within the discipline. The book avoids generalization and encourages interdisciplinarity through a number of critical and comparative contributions to this increasingly inclusive field of scholarship, which ensures its relevance in the ongoing debate about the capacity of American Studies to respond to an ever-broadening range of contemporary issues and challenges. Combining theory and practice in their examinations of academic and popular texts and investigations of American and non-American cultural matrices, the articles in this book will be interesting and useful to scholars and students, as well as the general reader.