- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
- Introduction
- Theatre Companies before the Revolution
- Revolutionary American Drama and Theatre
- Early Republican Drama
- The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama
- Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom
- Representing Ethnic Identity on the Antebellum Stage, 1825–61
- Antebellum Plays by Women: Contexts and Themes
- Reform Drama
- Antebellum Frontier and Urban Plays, 1825–60
- Late Melodrama
- A New Realism
- American Musical Theatre, 1870–1945
- The New Woman, the Suffragist, and the Stage
- The Rise of African American Drama, 1822–79
- The Provincetown Players in American Culture
- Eugene O’Neill
- Naturalism and Expressionism in American Drama
- American Political Drama, 1910–45
- The Federal Theatre Project
- African American Drama, 1910–45
- Arthur Miller: A Radical Politics of the Soul
- Tennessee Williams and the Winemiller Inheritance
- Experimental Theatre: Beyond Illusion
- Post–World War II African American Theatre
- The Postwar Musical
- Postwar Protest Plays
- Feminist Drama
- Postwar Drama and Technology
- Drama and the New Sexualities
- Political Drama
- Ethnicity and Postwar Drama
- Running Lines: Narratives of Twenty-First-Century American Theatre
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This essay examines the history of political drama in the United States from 1910 to 1945. It describes the diversity of styles used and attitudes taken by politically influenced dramas, including those that supported capitalism in the 1920s, the increasingly oppositional leftist dramas of the 1930s, and the pro-war (or antifascist) plays of the 1940s. This essay also considers how much political content is required in order to label a play as political.
Keywords: political drama, capitalism, leftist dramas, pro-war plays, political content
Christopher J. Herr is an associate professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Missouri State University. His recent writing on twentieth-century American drama has appeared in To Have or Have Not: Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre (McFarland, 2011), edited by James Fisher, and in Blackwell’s A Companion to Satire (2007), edited by Ruben Quintero.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- The Oxford Handbook of American Drama
- Introduction
- Theatre Companies before the Revolution
- Revolutionary American Drama and Theatre
- Early Republican Drama
- The Politics of Antebellum Melodrama
- Minstrelsy and Uncle Tom
- Representing Ethnic Identity on the Antebellum Stage, 1825–61
- Antebellum Plays by Women: Contexts and Themes
- Reform Drama
- Antebellum Frontier and Urban Plays, 1825–60
- Late Melodrama
- A New Realism
- American Musical Theatre, 1870–1945
- The New Woman, the Suffragist, and the Stage
- The Rise of African American Drama, 1822–79
- The Provincetown Players in American Culture
- Eugene O’Neill
- Naturalism and Expressionism in American Drama
- American Political Drama, 1910–45
- The Federal Theatre Project
- African American Drama, 1910–45
- Arthur Miller: A Radical Politics of the Soul
- Tennessee Williams and the Winemiller Inheritance
- Experimental Theatre: Beyond Illusion
- Post–World War II African American Theatre
- The Postwar Musical
- Postwar Protest Plays
- Feminist Drama
- Postwar Drama and Technology
- Drama and the New Sexualities
- Political Drama
- Ethnicity and Postwar Drama
- Running Lines: Narratives of Twenty-First-Century American Theatre
- Index