Category Archives: Publications

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)

Intertextuality in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Other Playwrights (McFarland 2013)

Eisenhauer and Murphy edEdited by ISGS and Eugene O’Neill Society members and theater scholars Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy, this anthology provides a wide range of new essays on such diverse American dramatists as Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving. The essayists offer numerous approaches to intertextuality: the influence of the poetry of romanticism and Shakespeare and of histories and novels, ideological and political discourses on American playwrights, unlikely connections between such writers as Miller and Wilder, the problems of intertexts in translation, the evolution in historical and performance contexts of the same tale, and the relationships among feminism, the drama of the courtroom, and the drama of the stage. The anthology includes the following new essays on Glaspell’s work:

Friedman, Sharon. “‘What There Is Behind Us’: Susan Glaspell’s Challenge to Nativist Discourse in Stage Adaptations of her Harper’s Monthly Fiction.”

Hagen, Lisa Hall. “Female Playwrights, Female Killers: Intersecting Texts of Crime and Gender in Glaspell, Watkins and Treadwell.”

Hernando-Real, Noelia. “On Closets and Graves: Intertextualities in Susan Glaspell’s Alison’s House and Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.”

Jouve, Emeline. “Intertextual Insanities in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge.”

Lasik, Franklin J. “Looking for Herland: Embodying the Search for Utopia in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge.”

Winetsky, Michael. “‘Trailing Clouds of Glory’: Glaspell, Romantic Ideology and Cultural Conflict in Modern American Literature.”

Withers, Sarah. “Intertextuality on the Frontier in Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors.”

Print ISBN:  978-0-7864-6391-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-0140-3

To order: http://www.mcfarlandbooks.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6391-6

 

Self and Space in the Theater of Susan Glaspell (McFarland 2011)

Published by McFarland, Noelia Hernando-Real’s exploration of eleven Glaspell plays written between 1915 and 1943 focuses on one of her major themes, the interplay between place and identity. Hernando-Real examines the means Glaspell employs to engage her characters in proxemical and verbal dialectics with the forces of place that turn them into victims of location, and her characters’ attempts to escape the influence of territoriality and shape identities of their own.
Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-6394-7
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-8832-2
To order:
http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/contents-2.php?id=978-0-7864-6394-7

Hernando-Real has also recently published “Sane Enough to Kill: On Women, Madness, and the Theatricality of Violence in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge” in Violence in American Drama. Essays on Its Staging, Meanings and Effects. Eds. Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz, Ramón Espejo Romero and Bernardo Muñoz Martinez. Also published by McFarland.

Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays (MacFarland 2010)

Edited by Linda Ben-Zvi, Professor Emerita in Theatre and English at Tel Aviv University and Colorado State University, and by  J. Ellen Gainor, Professor of Theatre and Associate Dean of the Graduate School at Cornell University.

The first complete collection of American Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Glaspell’s dramatic works, this book includes the one-acts Suppressed Desires, Trifles, The People, The Outside, Woman’s Honor, Close the Book, Tickless Time, and Free Laughter and the full-length plays Bernice, Inheritors, The Verge, Alison’s House, The Comic Artist, Chains of Dew, and Springs Eternal, the last two of which are published here for the first time. Each play includes an introductory essay along with extended biographical and critical analyses. Two appendices give details on both the first runs and select recent productions of the plays.

ISBN: 978-0-7864-3432-9

To order: http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-3432-9

Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories by Susan Glaspell (Iowa 2010)

Edited and with an introduction by Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier, this collection includes “A Jury of Her Peers” and 11 other Glaspell short stories never reprinted since their original publication, most in Harper’s Magazine, the preeminent arbiter of American literary tastes for over fifty years.  Bryan and Carpentier’s introduction places Glaspell’s short fiction in the traditions of Twain’s humor and Poe’s grotesque, and provides startling new data about the publication history of “Jury” — now for the first time, readers have access to the original ending of Glaspell’s most famous work.  Very affordable, this anthology would be a great addition to any course in American fiction.

To order go to Amazon, or:
http://www.uiowapress.org/

To listen to Patricia Bryan’s interview on WUNC, click on July 21.