Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Review Of Laura Engel And Elaine Mcgirr, Eds., Stage Mothers: Women, Work, And The Theater, 1660-1830, Kristina Straub

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Stage Mothers is a collection of essays that complicate the binary between female professional and domestic mother, contributing to theater history and the history of female professionalization and maternity.

Review Of Kathryn E. Davis, Liberty In Jane Austen's Persuasion, Stephanie Russo

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Heteronormativity In Eighteenth-Century Literature And Culture, Kevin Bourque

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Highest Form Of Public Scholarship, Cynthia Richards

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Women, Gender And The Arts: Intersections, Differences And Connections, Mona Narain

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

What's In A Name? New Vision For Abo, Laura Runge

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

Introduction to the new vision statements for the journal.

On The Contrary: Subverting The Canon With Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Christina Pellegrini

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis is aimed at documenting and synthesizing how I, as director, staged an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler through ongoing collaboration with a creative team comprised of dramaturges, designers, and actors.

I walk the reader through my exploration of Ibsen’s life and work through travel to the International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, Norway, and describe how I endeavored to lead the production’s creative team by applying feminist theories in directing and embracing the possibility of failure as a means of discovery. I discuss the casting process and establishment of an all-women ensemble, explore the …

From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This essay looks at T. S. Eliot's major dramatic productions from the 1930s-40s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party as a series of investigations into spatial expressions of faith. By using onstage space in unique ways, Eliot encourages audiences to consider the connections between performance and belief, the knowable and unknowable.

Arabella’S Valentines And Literary Connections [Dot] Com: Playing With Eighteenth-Century Gender Online, Melanie D. Holm

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

This article describes two digital assignments that ask students to imaginatively embody characters from eighteenth-century texts written by women in order to cultivate a greater awareness of the critical role of gender and gender critique in these works. The first of these assignments, “Arabella’s Valentines,” asks students to translate dialogue from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as humorous Internet memes. The second assignment, “Literary Connections [dot] com,” asks students to imagine how characters from the course archive might represent themselves on an internet dating site. Through creative role-play facilitated by these digital genres, students engage with the texts in stimulating …

Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

General Editor's Note, Laura Runge

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

The Unkindness Of Strangers: Exploring Success And Isolation In The Dramatic Works Of Tennessee Williams, Chelsea Nicole Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to explore the theme of isolation in the dramatic works of Tennessee Williams using his essay “The Catastrophe of Success” as the base theory text. The essay attacks the American idea of success though an in-depth examination of the “Cinderella myth” that Williams claims is so prevalent in both Hollywood and American Democracy. Williams’ deconstruction of this myth reveals that America’s love for stories like it results the isolation of three groups: homosexuals, women and the physically disabled and terminally ill. Williams passes no judgment on his characters, instead showing their lives as they truly are. Through …

Sibling Affection And Domestic Heterosexuality In Lodovick Carlell’S The Deserving Favorite, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

Lodowick Carlell’s play The Deserving Favorite (1629) deploys the ideological strategy of using erotic “likeness” to validate marital unions as consensual and erotically compatible. In an era before the normalization of heterosexuality, the play suggests that sexually passionate marital relations earn legitimacy to the degree that they emulate the affectionate relations between women and between siblings. Although eroticized female friendship approaches the ideal of a consensual and sensual partnership, intimate relations between women seem best to thrive in a separatist environment removed from courtly social and economic exchanges, including the marital negotiations crucial to cementing dynastic and political alliances. Brothers …

A Love Untaught By Law, Emma Oliver

VA Engage Journal

A self-proclaimed “live and let live” society, Laramie, Wyoming quickly became everything but when studied by the Tectonic Theater Company following the murder of Matthew Shepard. By drawing attention to disturbingly inherent elements of Laramie’s culture including verbal distancing, an elitist sentiment, and the belief that apathy is acceptable, the theater company exposes the hostile climate that has made this Wyoming city nearly unlivable for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning community. In analyzing the language and attitudes of the residents of Wyoming as brought to light in the play The Laramie Project, this paper confirms the danger in …

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …

Head In The Game: A One-Act Play, Carolyn Gage

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Head in the Game is a fifteen-minute, five-character, easy-to-stage-anywhere play that brings audiences into the world of male "pay-to-play" abuse of women, through a fantasy scenario of "boxing girls," women whom men pay to batter. The world of the boxing girls is an apt analogy for prostitution. The play uncompromisingly brings home the point that paying to use someone for sexual gratification is no more "sex" than paying to punch someone is boxing.