First published in 1972, the work provides an introduction to Dada and Surrealism. It explores the two movements and their cultural significance. It also looks at those who called themselves Dadaists and Surrealists, including their aims and achievements. In doing so, the book identifies the meaning that the two terms have acquired, which is often remote from the claims advanced by the chief adherents of each movement. This book will be a valuable resource to those studying Dada and Surrealism and its relationship to modern literature.

In this new edition of the widely-acclaimed Modern American Drama Christopher Bigsby completes his survey of postwar theater and brings the reader up to 2000. While retaining the key elements of the first edition, including surveys of major figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores recent works by established dramatists.

First published in 1972, the work provides an introduction to Dada and Surrealism. It explores the two movements and their cultural significance. It also looks at those who called themselves Dadaists and Surrealists, including their aims and achievements. In doing so, the book identifies the meaning that the two terms have acquired, which is often remote from the claims advanced by the chief adherents of each movement. This book will be a valuable resource to those studying Dada and Surrealism and its relationship to modern literature.

In this new edition of the widely-acclaimed Modern American Drama Christopher Bigsby completes his survey of postwar theater and brings the reader up to 2000. While retaining the key elements of the first edition, including surveys of major figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores recent works by established dramatists.

A cofounder of the Provincetown Players and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the first female playwrights. Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. And though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional, it nonetheless questions the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known for a single play, Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative innovation.

In this, the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century, Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented drama of Williams, Miller and Albee (volume 2) in order to trace other, parallel theatrical developments of the post-war period, including contemporary groups and playwrights. Beyond Broadway denotes the geographical and spiritual challenges to prevailing standards which so fragmented the theatre of the 1960s in particular. Following his analysis of the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway playwrights and theatres, Dr Bigsby separates the period into four main areas: performance theatre (including the Living Theatre and the Performance Group); the conjunction of dance, music and painting with drama in the ‘theatre of images’; two successful contemporary playwrights, Sam Shepard and David Mamet; and finally the committed theatre exemplified in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Chicano, black and women’s theatre.

This is the second volume in Christopher Bigsby's critical history of the important American dramatists and theatrical movements in the twentieth-century. Volume 1 brought the story to 1940 and included the last plays of O'Neill. In two further volumes Dr Bigsby covers the period from 1940 onwards. In Volume 2 he steps aside from the strict chronological progression to consider at length and in detail the achievement of the three great playwrights who dominate the post-war scene and who have earned an international reputation: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller and Edward Albee. All three brought to the Broadway Theatre (discussed separately in Volume 3) a strong degree of moral seriousness and aesthetic sensitivity. Dr Bigsby gives a full account of the early unpublished plays and the major works by each playwright, drawing on biographical detail and political background to illuminate his reading of the plays, which are illustrated by photographs of important productions.

American drama's maturation into a respected and vital art form is chronicled in this critical trilogy encompassing major trends and playwrights of the 20th century.