Amerikanische Literatur

Sappho meets Springsteen in Insecurity System by Sara Wainscott, a wry exploration of memory, motherhood, interdimensional time-travel, and the precarious future. Propelled by existential longing, these poems cycle between tenderness and rage, desire and despair, tracking the intertwined anxieties of making a living and making a life.

This powerful anthology brings together reflective and raw plays by American playwrights surrounding the psychic and political boundaries of the many faces and shadows of terrorism. <BR><BR>Allan Havis's introduction addresses a variety of terrorism cases from the last 25 years, examines several theories of the root causes of modern terrors, and underscores how theatre forms a unique contour to social and philosophical thought on terrorism. <BR><BR>With a foreword from Robert Brustein, the anthology features:<BR><BR>Break of Noon by Neil LaBute<BR>7/11 by Kia Corthron<BR>Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros<BR>Columbinus by PJ Paparelli and Stephen Karam<BR>Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them by Christopher Durang

Ezra Pound is one of the most significant poets of the 20th century; a writer whose poetry is particularly notable for the intensity of its linguistic qualities. This volume explores the development of Pound's understanding of language in the context of linguistics and the philosophy of language.

Paperback

Unrivalled in its coverage of recent work and writers, The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights surveys and analyses the breadth, vitality and development of theatrical work to emerge from America over the last fifty years.<BR> This authoritative guide leads you through the work of 25 major contemporary American playwrights, discussing more than 140 plays in detail. Written by a team of 25 eminent international scholars, each chapter provides:<BR> · a biographical introduction to the playwright's work; <BR> · a survey and concise analysis of the writer's most important plays; <BR> · a discussion of their style, dramaturgical concerns and critical reception; <BR> · a bibliography of published plays and a select list of critical works.<BR> Among the many Tony, Obie and Pulitzer prize-winning playwrights included are Sam Shepard, Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks, August Wilson, Paula Vogel and Neil LaBute. The abundance of work analysed enables fresh, illuminating conclusions to be drawn about the development of contemporary American playwriting.

The new essays in this collection, on such diverse writers as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving, fill an important conceptual gap. 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. Intertextuality has been an under-explored area in studies of dramatic and performance texts. The innovative findings of these scholars testify to the continuing vitality of research in American drama and performance.

Structures of the Jazz Age charts the 1920s cultural landscape populated by critical intellectuals like H.L. Mencken and Irving Babbitt, and by major imaginative writers like Dos Passos, Cather and Dreiser. Looking beyond the mainstream to more marginal schools of thought, including progressive educational philosophy, the critique of mass culture, and the cult of primitivism—exemplified in less canonized figures like Anzia Yezierska, Harry Leon Wilson and DuBose Heyward. He shows how these different strands were woven together in a way that helped to sustain Republican rule and an expanding economy, until the entire edifice came tumbling down in the stock market crash of 1929.

Some of the best and most original prose in America today is being written by literary journalists. Memoirs and personal essays, profiles, science and nature reportage, travel writing -- literary journalists are working in all of these forms with artful styles and fresh approaches. In Literary Journalism, editors Norman Sims and Mark Kramer have collected the finest examples of literary journalism from both the masters of the genre who have been working for decades and the new voices freshly arrived on the national scene.<BR><BR>The fifteen essays gathered here include:<BR>-- John McPhee's account of the battle between army engineers and the lower Mississippi River<BR>-- Susan Orlean's brilliant portrait of the private, imaginative world of a ten-year-old boy<BR>-- Tracy Kidder's moving description of life in a nursing home<BR>-- Ted Conover's wild journey in an African truck convoy while investigating the spread of AIDS<BR>-- Richard Preston's bright piece about two shy Russian mathematicians who live in Manhattan and search for order in a random universe<BR>-- Joseph Mitchell's classic essay on the rivermen of Edgewater, New Jersey<BR>-- And nine more fascinating pieces of the nation's best new writing<BR><BR>In the last decade this unique form of writing has grown exuberantly -- and now, in Literary Journalism, we celebrate fifteen of our most dazzling writers as they work with great vitality and astonishing variety.