The Theatre of Eugene ONeill: American Modernism on the World Stage

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Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018 The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his work. It includes a study of all his major playsThe Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Days Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elmsbesides numerous other full length and one act dramas. Eugene ONeill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet ONeills theatrical instincts were always shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while remaining rooted in its past. Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work: his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American 'pipe dreams' and the allure of success. The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology of the writer's life and times.

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This addition to the "Critical Companions" series provides a comprehensive examination of Eugene ONeills contributions as a dramatist and his critical role in establishing Americas modern theater Eisen (Tennessee Tech Univ.) tracks historic and subtle contributions of producers, artists, scholars, political events, and the press, detailing ONeills immense literary landscape and influence on Broadway and playwrights who came after him. Filled with insightful revelations from the historical perspective to present-day reflections, this study is certain to contribute to future critical debate. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *

Author Bio

Kurt Eisen is professor of English and associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Tennessee Tech University, USA, where he teaches courses in world literature and drama. He is the author of The Inner Strength of Opposites: ONeills Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (1994), and his work has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene ONeill, and a variety of journals. He was a fellow of the National Critics Institute in 2001 and is a past president of the Eugene ONeill Society.