This guidebook for transforming actual American figures and events
into dramatic form has aided many communities and groups in writing, planning, and producing first-rate historical dramas. The new edition of "Creating Historical Drama: A Guide for Communities, Theatre Groups, and Playwrights" features updated examples of drama and dramatic activities from short indoor productions to large-scale, outdoor historical dramas; new material about funding, economic impact on communities, budgeting, and marketing; and current information on physical theatre development.

Responding to a national interest in dramatizing historical material in a variety of community settings, the volume begins with a discussion on the scope and sources of historical drama, as well as the reasons for historicizing drama. From there, it details the features of biography, pageant, and epic dramas, and takes on important issues such as historical accuracy and dealing with expository material. The handbook then provides assistance in composing drama, leading and organizing the theatre group, organizing the community's resources, and evaluating the audience and the production site. Twenty-nine illustrations, with sketches by Darwin Payne and Ronald Naverson, augment the discussion.

Written for the nonspecialist and particularly useful to novice playwrights and directors, the volume is equally important for professional historians, educators, and theatre artists. More than a guidebook, "Creating Historical Drama" convincingly demonstrates that the genre is a beneficial and significant cultural phenomenon that not only educates and entertains, but also has the power to revitalize civic economy and morale.

This unique collection of lectures honors the pioneering work in Byron studies of Leslie Alexis Marchand, who has had an enduring influence on the appreciation and study of Lord Byron for sixty years. Generations of readers and writers have come to Byron through his biographies and his edition of the poet's letters and journals. All admirers of Byron respond to the verve, dash, and immediacy of his correspondence, which lies at the heart of Marchand's biographies and offers us a portrait based on the poet's views of himself and his times. No one has so powerfully and judiciously allowed Byron's life to emerge from the testimony of his letters. Many readers, from his contemporaries to our day, have refused to separate the poet from his troubled dark heroes, and see little but strands of autobiography in the poems. But the letters and journals reveal him in a very different light. Leslie Marchand provided these documents for the first time in their unexpurgated and authoritative form. This collection pays tribute to Marchand's careful scholarship and scrupulous attention to the limits of interpretation. Marchand's continued relevance to Byron studies derives in part from the work undertaken by those inspired by his labors as editor and interpreter; many of whom are represented in this collection. Three opening essays bear personal witness to his fervent support for young scholars, his depth of expertise and appeal as a teacher, and his commitment to encouraging others to join him on his Byron pilgrimage. The lectures themselves represent such diverse disciplines as literary theory, psychiatry, publishing history, comparative literature, drama, political history, revolutionary politics in literature and music, literary criticism, textual editing and selection, and literary influence. A chronology and a bibliography provide an overview of his life and scholarship.

Heathen Valley, Romulus Linney's haunting and original novel, was born from the church histories of the Valle Crucis mission in western North Carolina. Told in four parts, it is a story set in an almost unknown valley, "Heathen, a valley That Forgot God." With a quiet, muscular violence and biblical grace that readers of Cormac McCarthy will recognize, Linney takes us into the 1850s, where an idealistic Bishop from New England and a life-whipped, sorrowful transient named Starns, struggle to win souls and transform the valley. Widely reviewed when it was first published in 1962 and selected as an alternate for the Book of the Month Club, Romulus Linney's first novel Heathen Valley was never reprinted and has never before been in paperback.
"Starns was thirty-two years old that night, but he looked fifty. He was like a much older man who comes late in life to what learning he possesses, and therefore has no fear of what he knows he will never understand." from Heathen Valley