front cover of In His Own Voice
In His Own Voice
The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Ohio University Press, 2002
Paul Laurence Dunbar, introduced to the American public by William Dean Howells, was the first native-born African American poet to achieve national and international fame. While there have been many valuable editions of his works over time, gaps have developed when manuscripts were lost or access to uncollected works became difficult. In His Own Voice brings together previously upublished and uncollected short stories, essays, and poems. This volume also establishes Dunbar’s reputation as a dramatist who mastered standard English conventions and used dialect in musical comedy for ironic effects. In His Own Voice collects more than seventy-five works in six genres. Featured are the previously unpublished play Herrick and two one-act plays, largely ignored for a century, that demonstrate Dunbar’s subversion of the minstrel tradition. This generous expansion of the canon also includes a short story never before published. Herbert Woodward Martin, renowned for his live portrayal of Dunbar, and Ronald Primeau provide a literary and historical context for this previously untreated material, firmly securing the reputation of an important American voice.
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front cover of Shaw's Daughters
Shaw's Daughters
Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender
J. Ellen Gainor
University of Michigan Press, 1991
For almost a century critics of George Bernard Shaw's dramatic works have accepted the characterization of Shaw as an artist and thinker well ahead of his time with regard to social issues—women's liberation in particular. Since the first wave of feminist criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, however, very little effort has been made to examine Shaw's works in the light of the most recent and challenging developments in feminist theory and gender studies. Now, at a time of renewed historical interest in his plays, J. Ellen Gainor brings the critical understanding of Shaw's work into the present day. Gainor introduces previously unexamined reviews and articles by Shaw's female contemporaries—and discovers among them a remarkable resistance to his depictions of women. Through an analysis of three major character tropes Gainor discovers dramaturgical patterns in Shaw's gender construction that work against the contention that the author created positive and progressive images of women and that situate his work well within the dominant social ideologies of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Gainor demonstrates that positioning Shaw firmly among his contemporaries may actually resolve some of the troubling issues in his dramaturgy, allowing us to understand more clearly the origins of a number of his female character types, and even to see continuities throughout his work where they have not been shown before.
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