Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama

The conflict between the political and the personal, an opposition which pervades the whole of American Literature, informs the essays on twentieth-century American theater gathered in this volume. Prominent theater scholars from Europe and America address the cultural paradigm created by the clash of private needs with public expectations. The difficulty of reconciling the two has led many dramatists to turn to the complexities of intertextuality in order to express their rebellions and rejections of inherited cultural values and myths. Essays on Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Susan Glaspell, H.M. Koutoukas, Dolores Prida, or Suzan Lori-Parks (to name but a few of the dramatists discussed here) reflect the vibrancy of American drama and the depth of the interaction of the political with the personal.