The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill - (Critical Companions) by Kurt Eisen (Paperback)

About the Book

This Critical Companion provides a detailed study of the plays of the Nobel Prize-winning dramatist and situates O'Neill's modernism as a distinctive expression of American culture and stage traditions.

Book Synopsis

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 plays-The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms-besides numerous other full length and one act dramas.

Eugene O'Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet O'Neill's 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.

Review Quotes

"This addition to the "Critical Companions" series provides a comprehensive examination of Eugene O'Neill's contributions as a dramatist and his critical role in establishing America's modern theater ... Eisen (Tennessee Tech Univ.) tracks historic and subtle contributions of producers, artists, scholars, political events, and the press, detailing O'Neill's 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

About the Author

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: O'Neill's Novelistic Drama and the Melodramatic Imagination (1994), and his work has appeared in The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill, and a variety of journals. He was a fellow of the National Critics Institute in 2001 and is a past president of the Eugene O'Neill Society.