While Oscar Wilde's delightfully-witty comedies of manners receive the most fanfare from the general public and much of academia, Wilde's most "serious" play-Salome-rightfully deserves an equal amount of attention. Written by emerging scholars, established scholars, and notable Wilde scholars at the top of the field, the far-ranging essays in this book-the first collection solely on Wilde's Salome-provide new readings of the play, allowing us to better assess how and why Salome either fits or does not fit into Wilde's oeuvre. Framed in a new light in this collection, this fuller understanding...

Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire...

As the first collection of essays specifically about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as "comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on bo

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, thisbook uses the works of fivemajor playwrights of the 1950s to providea timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century."

Eugene O'Neill, Nobel Laureate in Literature and Pulitzer Prize winner, is widely known for his full length plays. However, his one-act plays are the foundation of his work - both thematically and stylistically, they telescope his later plays. This collection aims to fill the gap by examining these texts, during what can be considered O'Neill's formative writing years, and the foundational period of American drama. A wide-ranging investigation into O'Neill's one-acts, the contributors shed light on a less-explored part of his career and assist scholars in understanding O'Neill's entire...

As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on both the context and the texts, the collection locates Wilde both in his social and literary contexts.

In this unique study, Michael Y. Bennett re-reads four influential modern plays alongside their contemporary debates between rationalism and empiricism to show how these monumental achievements were thoroughly a product of their time, but also universal in their epistemological quest to understand the world through a rational and/or empirical model. Bennett contends that these plays directly engage in their contemporary epistemological debates rather than through the lens of a specific philosophy. Besides producing new, insightful readings of heavily-studied plays, the interdisciplinary...