“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 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)

Edited 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