Intertextuality in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O’Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller and Other Playwrights

Abstract

in American Drama: Critical Essays on Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur and Other Playwrights. Edited by Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy. North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company 2013.The recent collection of essays edited by Drew Eisenhauer and Brenda Murphy on significant American dramatists offers some innovative and refreshingly original approaches to understanding and savoring the noteworthy works of those dramatists. The collection is divided into two parts labeled Literary Intertextuality and Cultural Intertextuality, and those two parts are further divided into four sections titled: Poets, Playwrights and Performance Texts, Cultural Texts, and Cultural Context, with the first two sections assigned to Part One and the second two assigned to Part Two. Eisenhauer and Murphy have carefully arranged the essays in each section fittingly both by each essay's connection to that section's thematic perspective and by the relation of each essay to others in that section.The most interesting and novel aspect of the essays is the manner in which each essayist connects an American dramatist to some author or concept in a previously unexplored fashion. Herman Daniel Farrell III discusses a connection between O'Neill and The Ancient Mariner while Aurelie Sanchez links O'Neill to Shakespeare and Keats. Noelia Hemando-Real's essay examines the association between Susan Glaspell and Emily Dickinson while Annalisa Brugnoli investigates the role of archangels in O'Neill and the Bible, Nietzsche, and Jung. The other essays similarly present topics that would be of interest both to scholars of modem American drama and to students interested in viewing developing approaches in the continued study of how that drama is connected both thematically and textually to other genres.This review will summarize the two articles that scrutinize specifically: Stephen Marino's 'Cut Out the Town and You Will Cut Out the Poetry': Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller and Ramon Espejo Romero's Rain in an Actually Strange City: Translating and Re-Situating the Universality of Arthur Death of a SalesmanMarino discusses the connection between Miller's works and Wilder's Our Town through a specific and convincing cataloguing of the cultural and thematic associations that derives from Wilder's work. Marino asserts that both and Wilder were interested in the psychological and social complexities of the American family. …