Eugene O'Neill's One-Act Plays New Critical Perspectives

by Bennett, Michael Y.; Carson, Benjamin D.

• ISBN13: 9780230339811
• ISBN10: 0230339816
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-08-07
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Although Eugene O'Neill's work has generated much scholarship, his one-act plays have not received the critical attention they deserve. Given that O'Neill began his career writing one-act plays, including his justly famous "Sea Plays," associated with the Provincetown Players, it is surprising that his one-acts have been largely neglected. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining O'Neill's one-act plays, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the formative period of American drama. It is our hope that a wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts will shed light on a less-explored part of his career, and thus assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire oeuvre.

Author Biography

Michael Y. Bennett is an assistant professor of English in Drama at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author of Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (2011) and Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (2012). He is also the editor of Refiguring Oscar Wilde's Salome (2011). Benjamin D. Carson is an associate professor and chair of the Department of English at Bridgewater State University. He has published essays on Edith Wharton, Gerald Vizenor, Ana Castillo, and Clarence Major and edited Sovereignty, Separatism, and Survivance: Ideological Encounters in the Literature of Native North America.

Table of Contents

"This collection of essays succeeds admirably at its editors' aims of revealing the continuity between O'Neill's early work and the great plays of his mature years and of placing his one-acts in the Modernist and Progressive Era contexts in which his work began. In the hands of long-standing O'Neill experts like Zander Brietzke, Thierry Dubost, Kurt Eisen, and Steven Bloom, as well as knowledgeable and talented younger critics, the plays receive what is in many cases their first serious scrutiny from the theoretical perspectives of sociology, economics, queer theory, epistemology, Existentialism, and formal aesthetics, and these essays show they are worthy of it" - Brenda Murphy, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English, University of Connecticut, and author of The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity

"Bennett and Carson have assembled a remarkable range of essays on a tough and enigmatic subject. The first of its kind and long overdue, this volume recasts O'Neill's too often dismissed one-acts in crucial ways—as the preliminary 'stammerings' of O'Neill's late masterworks, yes, but also as invaluable renderings of the political, economic, and sociological realities of America's Progressive Era and the turbulent modern scene that followed closely at its heels." - Robert M. Dowling, author and editor of the two-volume Critical Companion to Eugene O'Neill (2009) and Eugene O'Neill and His Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives, and the Avant Garde (2011).