For the first time, this volume brings together essays by feminist, Americanist, and theater scholars who apply a variety of sophisticated critical approaches to Susan Glaspell's entire oeuvre. Glaspell's one-act play, "Trifles," and the short story that she constructed from it, "A Jury of Her Peers," have drawn the attention of many feminist critics, but the rest of her writing-the short stories, plays and novels-is largely unknown. The essays gathered here will allow students of literature, women's studies and theater studies an insight into the variety and scope of her oeuvre. Glaspell's...

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

On a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Greenwich Village bohemians gathered in the summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell was inspired by a sensational murder trial to write Trifles, a play about two women who hide a Midwestern farm wife's motive for murdering her abusive husband. Following successful productions of the play, Glaspell became the "mother of American drama." Her short story version of Trifles, "A Jury of Her Peers," reached an unprecedented one million readers in 1917. The play and the story have since been taught in classrooms across America and Trifles is regularly revived...

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.