Plays by Early American Women, 1775-1850 - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 047206598X ISBN 13: 9780472065981

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 1995

Synopsis

Plays by Early American Women: 1775-1850 provides a comprehensive view of American women's engagement with drama. Standard histories and anthologies of American theater and drama have paid scant attention to women although they actively participated in the formation of a distinctively American drama and were vital in the production of that drama before the twentieth century. The plays in this collection- The Group (1775) by Mercy Otis Warren, Slaves in Algiers (1794) by Susanna Haswell Rowson, The Traveller Returned (1796) by Judith Sargent Murray, The Female Enthusiast (1807) by Sarah Pogson, The Fair Americans (1815) by Mary Carr Clarke, Altorf (1819) by Frances Wright, Ernest Maltravers (1838) by Louisa Medina, and The Forest Princess (1844) by Charlotte Barnes Conner- amply demonstrate the range, strength, popularity, and importance of women's dramatic writing during that period.
Running the gamut of subject and style these plays, several of them exceptionally stageworthy, indicate the ways in which early American women defined themselves and serve to highlight common patterns in their experience of day-to-day life. At the same time, they construct ideal images of the American woman that were often explicitly held up for emulation by playwrights who evinced a lively concern with defining what it meant to be American.
The book includes an introduction that discusses historical context and presents a short biography of each playwright and bibliography of American women playwrights to 1900, with over a thousand entries. This anthology is thus a valuable resource for historians, researchers, and students of American literature, American drama, and women's studies.
"The selection of works is excellent. I can't imagine teaching a nineteenth-century American theater history course without it. With this book, such courses can set female dramatists side-by-side with novelists, essayists, and poets."--Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University
Amelia Howe Kritzer is Assistant Professor of Theater, West Virginia University. She is author of The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment (Macmillan).

About this title

About the Author:

Amelia Howe Kritzer was Assistant Professor of Theater, West Virginia University. She is author of The Plays of Caryl Churchill: Theatre of Empowerment (Macmillan).

Review:

"The selection of works is excellent. I can't imagine teaching a nineteenth-century American theater history course without it. With this book, such courses can set female dramatists side-by-side with novelists, essayists, and poets."
—Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University
(Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University 1999-04-07)

". . . an excellent resource for students and instructors of American literature and drama that helps to demonstrate the range of women's literary skill and theatrical involvement from 1775-1850."
—Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
(Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1999-04-01)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 047206598X
• ISBN 13: 9780472065981
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448
• Editor: Kritzer Amelia Howe