Category Archives: Publications

Susan Glaspell: teatro, vanguardia y humor (1917-1918)

In Susan Glaspell: teatro, vanguardia y humor (1917-1918) [Susan Glaspell: theatre, avant-garde and humour (1917-1918)], published by Universitat de València, three of Glaspell’s one-act classics have been rendered into living Spanish translations by poet and scholar, Nieves Alberola Crespo. The Outside, Woman´s Honor and Tickless Time range from the tragic, psychological, and profound to the light and humorous, yet they deal with Glaspell’s essential themes: the struggle for women’s social and political equality in America and the need for and success of women’s solidarity. They demonstrate Glaspell’s pioneering and often over-looked early modernist experimentation, which rivaled and preceded that of her friend Eugene O’Neill. Each play is accompanied by a detailed essay which provides not only academic criticism, but also notes, contexts, interviews with practitioners, and other invaluable background that can help readers, teachers, students or actors understand and, most importantly, play the amusing and heartbreaking work of Susan Glaspell.

https://puv.uv.es/susan-glaspell-teatro-vanguardia-y-humor-1917-1918.html

Table of contents:

Prólogo, Drew Eisenhauer

Más allá del dolor
En las afueras

 Juego de apariencias
El honor de una mujer

La quimera del tiempo
El reloj de sol

Bigliografía

Die Rose Im Sand, Stories

2023 is the year for new translations of Glaspell’s work! Announcing Die Rose Im Sand, Stories published by Dörlemann Verlag, translations of selected Glaspell short stories into German by professional translator, Henning Bochert. Only two of Glaspell’s novels have been translated into German, both before 1950, joined by “A Jury of Her Peers” a few years ago. Henning put in two years of research with support from the Berlin Senate, the German Translators Fund, and an ISGS translation grant, came to the U.S. and consulted with numerous Glaspell scholars, in order to reintroduce German readers to the enduring relevance of Glaspell’s work. He chose ten Glaspell stories from Lifted Masks (1912, 1993) and from Her America (2010, eds Bryan and Carpentier), with a focus less on the feminist aspects of Glaspell’s work, which have been in the foreground of research since the 1970s, and more on the class issues in her short prose.

Herausgegeben, aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Henning Bochert
288 Seiten. Fadenheftung. Leseband
€ [D] 26.00 / € [A] 26.80 / SFr. 35.00 (UVP)
ISBN 9783038201342

Als eBook erhältlich!
eBook ISBN 978-3-03820-900-3
€ 19.99

https://doerlemann.ch/6942

To read an interview with Henning about translating Glaspell’s work: https://henningbochert.de/en/?s=glaspell

Trifles/Peccadilles; The Outside/De l’Autre côté; Women’s Honor/L’Honneur d’une femme

2023 featured new translations of Glaspell’s work, including this translation of Trifles, The Outside, and Women’s Honor into French, published by Presses Universitaires du Midi and edited and with a foreward by ISGS President Emeline Jouve. This bilingual collection is part of series, Théâtre – Nouvelles Scènes/Anglais, devoted to the publication of plays written in
English, providing both the original texts and the translations, which will be very useful for students as well as for future productions of these plays in France. Trifles was translated as Peccadilles by Aurélie Delevallée, The Outside translated as De l’Autre côté by Sophie Maréujouls-Koch, and Woman’s Honor translated as L’Honneur d’une femme by Julie Vatain-Corfdir.

The publication has been made possible notably thanks to an ISGS translation grant.

Susan Glaspell in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

The International Susan Glaspell Society was formed in 2003 with the stated mission of “broadening the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer though production of high-quality scholarship and critical analyses of all her works, participation in national and international conferences, performances, and public readings of her plays, and the commitment to reprinting and teaching her plays, stories, and novels.” Since then many conference panels have been presented nationally and internationally, many performances and readings of Glaspell’s plays have been staged, and many ground-breaking books have been published by a core group of dedicated Susan Glaspell and Provincetown Players scholars. This new collection, Susan Glaspell in Context, released by Cambridge University Press in July 2023, represents the culmination of these 20-years of scholarly excellence and commitment.

Edited and inspired by J. Ellen Gainor, author of Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 1915-48, and co-editor with Linda Ben-Zvi of The Complete Plays, this collection provides new, accessible, and informative essays by all of the leading international scholars and artists about Susan Glaspell’s life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell’s fiction, plays, and non-fiction in historical and contemporary critical contexts, including sections on Glaspell’s early Midwestern background, her place as a woman in American journalism, her involvement in the Chicago Renaissance as well as Bohemian Greenwich Village, her roles in the Provincetown Players and the Little Theater Movement, and her signal contributions to Modernism both fictional and dramatic. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell’s works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell’s career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection’s thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

Many heartfelt thanks to Ellen from all of us at ISGS for her leadership and indefatigable commitment to our mission.

ISBN 9781108767309

To order: Susan Glaspell in Context (cambridge.org)

 

 

Rosas en la arena. Los relatos de Susan Glaspell (Universitat de València, 2022)

Former ISGS President Noelia Hernando-Real (right) with current President Emeline Jouve (left)

Presenting another important contribution to establishing Susan Glaspell’s reputation among readers and scholars in Spain by former ISGS President Noelia Hernando-Real.  This volume is the first lengthy introduction of Susan Glaspell and her fiction to Spanish readership. The first part of the book places Glaspell’s short fiction within its context and places the author as a remarkable contributor to U.S. short story tradition. The second part of the book, which includes the translation into Spanish of eight of her more than seventy short stories, exemplifies Glaspell’s numerous stylistic and thematic choices and how her short fiction, as her drama, challenges social, political, and artistic rules.

Tradicional y modernista, costumbrista y arriesgada, complaciente y feminista, la obra de ficción de Susan Glaspell no se ajusta a patrones sencillos. Ganadora de un Premio Pulitzer de teatro, adalid de la vanguardia teatral en Estados Unidos, escritora de novelas de reconocido prestigio, hasta hoy sus relatos siguen siendo el secreto mejor guardado de la literatura norteamericana. Este volumen presenta, por primera vez en castellano, la faceta más desconocida de la autora, su narrativa breve, con la traducción de ocho de sus más de setenta relatos, en los que se revela su variedad estilística y temática y que sitúan a Glaspell en un lugar preeminente de la imponente tradición de la narrativa breve estadounidense, a la que contribuye con arriesgadas propuestas sociales, políticas y artísticas.

https://puv.uv.es/libro/rosas-en-la-arena-los-relatos-de-susan-glaspell.html

Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players (University of Alabama Press, 2022)

Jeffery Kennedy began his career as a protégé of the great O’Neill biographers, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. Over the years he has collected the most comprehensive personal archive of Provincetown Players documents and photographs, as well traveling around the country and becoming deeply familiar with every academic and public archive. He is also the greatest raconteur of the Provincetown legends and stories, known and unknown, as well as an accomplished academic and theatre professional in his own right. Therefore his book, the first contemporary and comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players since Robert Sarlos 1982 Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players, has been long and eagerly awaited.

In Staging America: The Artistic Legacy of the Provincetown Players, Jeffery Kennedy tells the unabridged story of the innovative theatre group, from their roots in colonial American traditions to the tragic division of the O’Neill and Cook factions in 1924. In a meticulously researched and comprehensive narrative drawing on many new sources that have only become available in the last three decades, Kennedy modifies, refutes, and enhances previous studies, while shining new light at every turn on the history of the Provincetown Players.

Kennedy has placed a re-evaluation of George Cram Cook at the center of his study, tracing Cook’s mission of “cultural patriotism,” which drove him toward creating a uniquely American identity in theatre. Kennedy also provides many detailed narratives of the originating Provincetowners, adding significantly to the biographical record of the Players’ forty-seven playwrights, including Susan Glaspell, Neith Boyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, Rita Wellman, Mike Gold, Djuna Barnes, and John Reed. Kennedy also examines other important artistic, literary, and political figures who influenced the Players, including Emma Goldman, Charles Demuth, Berenice Abbott, Sophie Treadwell, Theodore Dreiser, Claudette Colbert, and Charlie Chaplin. Finally, Kennedy re-evaluates the contribution of Eugene O’Neill to the Provincetown Players, and the company’s contribution to his development.

In the words of O’Neill’s most recent biographer, Rob Dowling: “Jeffery Kennedy’s Staging America, a major event for theatre studies worldwide, is a magisterial chronical of George Cram Cook’s leadership of the Provincetown Players—‘a little theater group’ orchestrated by the uniquely inspiring Cook, a Midwestern dreamer who was, without question, directly responsible for the birth of modern American drama.”

Jeff at the Provincetown Players Wharf site leading a tour during the 2015 centennial celebration.

Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre (Indiana University Press, 2022)

Marcia Noe’s impressive career as a Glaspell scholar began in 1983 with her publication of the first modern biography of Susan Glaspell, Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland (Western Illinois University Press). Over the intervening years Noe contributed many feminist and formalist analyses of Glaspell’s plays, often illuminating their context in Midwestern culture. This body of work is now crowned with her publication of Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre, which tells a part of the Provincetown story that has not yet been told.

In this book Noe argues that the progressive social, political, and cultural activities in which Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell were involved in early twentieth-century Davenport, Iowa, informed not only the plays that they wrote but also the aesthetic and theatre practice of the Provincetown Players (1915-1922), the theatre company that contributed significantly to the foundation of modern American drama. The philosophical and political orientations of Dell, Cook, and Glaspell, fostered in their Midwestern hometown, helped to create a theatre practice marked by experimentalism, collaboration, leftist cultural critique, rebellion, liberation, and community engagement.

This book situates the origin of the Provincetown aesthetic in Davenport, Iowa, a Mississippi River town in which a large German population provided a particularly fertile cultural environment, including a Socialist local in which Dell and Cook were active. In addition to their political activities, Noe establishes that Dell’s work as reporter and editor for The Tri-City Workers Magazine, Dell’s and Cook’s leadership in the Monist Society, and Cook and Glaspell’s role in the Davenport censorship controversy were reflected in the plays that they wrote for the Provincetown Players. She discusses how all three writers were able to see that radical politics sometimes begets radical chic and shows how, consequently, several of their plays satirize the faddish elements of the progressive political, social, and cultural movements in which they were active.

Although the Provincetown Players was located on the East Coast, several of Dell’s, Cook’s, and Glaspell’s plays were set in their native Midwest. Noe’s new book tells the story of how Dell, Cook, and Glaspell effected a marriage between early twentieth-century Midwestern radicalism and East Coast avant-garde theatre practice, a marriage that resulted in a fresh and energetic contribution to American theatre.

The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption (University of Iowa Press, 2022)

With this new book in the Iowa and the Midwest Experience series, Patricia L. Bryan and Thomas Wolf add to their already indispensable legal/historical work relevant to Glaspell’s oeuvre, which began with Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Chapel Hill, 2005), their exhaustive study of the Margaret Hossack case upon which Glaspell based Trifles /  “A Jury of Her Peers”. The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption tells the story of 11-year-old Wesley’s crime in Iowa in 1889—the murder of his abusive father and stepmother—and his incarceration as a child in an adult prison.  During the next twelve years, he educated himself, argued eloquently for his release, and won the support of prison wardens, educators, newspaper editors, and politicians.  For Bryan and Wolf, it is a story of heroic perseverance and an exploration of the social, political, and legal systems of the era.

Bryan and Wolf’s research continues to be an invaluable resource for Glaspell scholars. As a young reporter, Glaspell took an interest in youthful offenders, covering the Mitchellville Girls School riot of 1899 and, four years later, she wrote “In the Face of His Constituents,” based on the case of Wesley Elkins.  When Glaspell included the story in her 1912 collection, Lifted Masks, she retitled it “The Plea.” In this book, Bryan and Wolf devote part of a chapter to Glaspell’s reporting on the Mitchellville riot, and a full chapter to her fictional portrayal of the legislative debate over Wesley’s release from prison.

The Plea is not just an impeccable piece of historical scholarship, but a gripping work of narrative nonfiction. Devoid of any taint of sensationalism, the book vividly reconstructs the fascinating, long-forgotten case of an eleven-year-old committing parricide, the boy’s long struggle to rehabilitate himself, and his ultimate redemption. An immensely readable and thought-provoking book—one with particular relevance in our own age of increasing juvenile homicides—it will captivate both American history buffs and fans of true crime.”—Harold Schechter, author

The Plea: The True Story of Young Wesley Elkins and His Struggle for Redemption (Iowa and the Midwest Experience): Bryan, Patricia L., Wolf, Thomas: 9781609388393: Amazon.com: Books

 

Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion (University of Iowa Press, 2017)

“In Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion, Emeline Jouve has cleared away what Lawrence Langer once called Glaspell’s ‘old lace’ to reveal the ‘steel lining beneath the tender surface’—the politics and, really, outrage at injustice and belief in democratic idealism that are at the center of Glaspell’s dramaturgy—and her raison d’être as a writer.” — Drew Eisenhauer, Coventry University

A pioneer of American modern drama and founding member of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) wrote plays of a kind that Robert Brustein defines as a “drama of revolt,” an expression of the dramatists’ discontent with the prevailing social, political, and artistic order. Her works display her determination to put an end to the alienating norms that, in her eyes and those of her bohemian peers, were stifling American society. This determination both to denounce infringements on individual rights and to reform American life through the theatre shapes the political dimension of her drama of revolt.

Analyzing plays from the early Trifles (1916) through Springs Eternal (1943) and the undated, incomplete Wings, author Emeline Jouve illustrates the way that Glaspell’s dramas addressed issues of sexism, the impact of World War I on American values, and the relationship between individuals and their communities, among other concerns. Jouve argues that Glaspell turns the playhouse into a courthouse, putting the hypocrisy of American democracy on trial. In staging rebels fighting for their rights in fictional worlds that reflect her audience’s extradiegetic reality, she explores the strategies available to individuals to free themselves from oppression. Her works envisage a better future for both her fictive insurgents and her spectators, whom she encourages to consider which modes of revolt are appropriate and effective for improving the society they live in. The playwright defines social reform in terms of collaboration, which she views as an alternative to the dominant, alienating social and political structures. Not simply accusing but proposing solutions in her plays, she wrote dramas that enacted a positive revolt.

A must for students of Glaspell and her contemporaries, as well as scholars of American theatre and literature of the first half of the twentieth century.

https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/

$65 or Sale Price $48 with promo code jouv17
9781609385088

On Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers”: Centennial Essays, Interviews and Adaptations (McFarland, 2015)

Trifles Centennial McFarland On Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers”: Centennial Essays, Interviews and Adaptations celebrates the 2016 centennial of Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers” with a selection of all new essays featuring an international roster of contributors. Edited by Martha C. Carpentier and Emeline Jouve, the collection joins academic scholarship with theatre practitioner interviews and two original creative works inspired by Glaspell’s iconic works.

In the summer of 1915 on a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the summer gathering place of Greenwich Village artists and writers, Susan Glaspell was inspired by memories of the sensational Hossack murder trial she covered as a young reporter in Des Moines to write Trifles – her play about two women who discover and hide a Midwestern farm wife’s motive for murdering her abusive husband. Following successful productions of her plays by the innovative little theatre she helped to found, the Provincetown Players, Glaspell, already a well-received fiction writer, was transformed into the mother of American drama. In addition, her story version, “A Jury of Her Peers,” reached an unprecedented one million readers in 1917 through multiple publications. Since then, both have been repeatedly anthologized, taught in high school, college, and law school classrooms across America, and read around the world. Trifles is regularly revived on stages big and small from New York’s Public Theatre to London’s Orange Tree Theatre, to Ontario’s Shaw Festival, to China’s National Symposium on American Drama and Theatre.

CONTENTS:
Martha C. Carpentier and Emeline Jouve, “Introduction: An Iconic Work at 100 Years”

Part I: SCHOLARS’ VOICES

Catherine Q. Forsa, “Forensic Science and the Aesthetics of Affect in ‘A Jury of Her Peers’”

Marie-Pierre Maechling-Mounié, “Seeing, Looking, Pointing: A Linguistic Reading of Trifles and ‘A Jury of her Peers’”

Ilka Saal and Mareike Dolata, “Susan Glaspell’s Radicalization of Women’s Crime Fiction: Female Reading Strategies from Anna Katharine Green to Sara Paretsky”

Linda Ben-Zvi, “Silent Partners: The ‘Trifling’ Nature of Language in the Theatre of Susan Glaspell and Samuel Beckett”

Noelia Hernando-Real, “Powerful Gazes: The Right to Look in Film Adaptations of Trifles and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’”

Drew Eisenhauer, “Susan Glaspell’s Gendered Detectives in Trifles and a ‘Jury of Her Peers’: Suspense and the Threat to Masculine Identity in Radio and Screen Adaptations from 1930 to 1961”

Part II: PRACTITIONERS’ VOICES

Interviews
Sharon Friedman, “Trifles and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’ on Film: Interview with Filmmakers Sally Heckel and Pamela Gaye Walker”

Barbara Ozieblo, “Producing Susan Glaspell’s Plays: Interview with Founders of the Orange Tree Theatre, Sam Walters and Auriol Smith”

Barbara Ozieblo, “Trifles in Production at the Orange Tree Theatre, 2008: Interview with Director Helen Leblique

Adaptations / Creations
Milbre Burch, “Sometimes I Sing: Freeing the Voice of Minnie Wright in Trifles” and Sometimes I Sing

John G. Bilotta and John F. McGrew. “Creating an Opera Libretto from Trifles” and John F. McGrew, Trifles: Libretto

ISBN 978-1476662114
To order: http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-1-4766-6211-4

(Cover illustration by Emily Cooper)