Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama [Hardcover]

American dramas consciously rewrite the past as a means of determined criticism and intentional resistance. While modern criticism often sees the act of revision as derivative, Malburne-Wade uses Victor Turner's concept of the social drama and the concept of the liminal to argue for a more complicated view of revision.Introduction 1. Confession and Crime, Confession as Crime: Williams' Tituba's Childre n and Miller' s The Crucible 2. Confrontation and Challenge: Baldwin's Blues for Mister Char li e as Response to the Murder of Emmett Till 3. Condemnation as Redress: Herman Melville's Benito Cereno , Richard Wright's Man, God Ain't Like That , and Robert Lowell 's Benito Cereno 4. Celebration of Family as a Means of Difference and Hope: Hansberry' s A Raisin in the Sun and Odets' Awake and Sing! Conclusion: Intentions and Impacts

In Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama, Malburne-Wade extends Harold Bloom's notions of 'anxiety' and 'misreading' in relation to intertextuality. But she also steps away from the Bloomian psychology to lay bare the moral dimensions of the 'bleed' and 'discomfort' involved in consciously revisiting and revising earlier texts, historical or literary. In reading six plays together - three each by white American and African American writers - Malburne-Wade deftly situates American drama in the mid-twentieth century as a persistent reminder of the repetitive nature of history, particularly when, as a whole, we fail to learn from our errors or to advance our democracy in responding to modern issues such as slavery and racism, McCarthyism, and colonialism. - Amritjit Singh, Langston Hughes Professor, English, Ohio University, USA

Malburne-Wade's book unpacks layers of historical and literary renderings of the past to reveal the significance of political statements being made in each author's present as well as our own. By explicating the ways in which writers like Arthur Miller, William Carlos Wilľ