Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
9 - O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Celebrant of loss: Eugene O'Neill 1888-1953
- 2 O'Neill's philosophical and literary paragons
- 3 O'Neill and the theatre of his time
- 4 From trial to triumph: the early plays
- 5 The middle plays
- 6 The late plays
- 7 Notable American stage productions
- 8 O'Neill on screen
- 9 O'Neill's America: the strange interlude between the wars
- 10 O'Neill's African and Irish-Americans: stereotypes or “faithful realism”?
- 11 O'Neill's female characters
- 12 "A tale of possessors self-dispossessed"
- 13 Trying to write the family play: autobiography and the dramatic imagination
- 14 The stature of Long Day's Journey Into Night
- 15 O'Neill and the cult of sincerity
- 16 O'Neill criticism
- Select bibliography of full-length works
- Index
Summary
Perhaps because Eugene O'Neill tended to cast his work in universal terms, critics tend to write of him in relation to the world stage and to the recognizably seminal thinkers and playwrights of his time - Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Ibsen, Shaw. O'Neill is not often thought of as a distinctly American playwright working in an American theatrical tradition and living almost all of his life in the United States, keenly interested in the political, social, and moral developments in his country. Yet, in his last decade of playwriting, O'Neill was at work on a most ambitious treatment of American history, his projected play Cycle about the cultural history of the United States from 1775 to 1932, based on the story of a single American family, a union of the English Harfords and the Irish Melodys, which is dealt with in detail in other essays in this collection. The Cycle's overall title, A Tale of Possessors, Self-Dispossessed, indicates O'Neill's point of view, essentially an indictment of America's greed and materialism and its failure to value spirituality or beauty.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Eugene O'Neill , pp. 135 - 147Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
- 1
- Cited by