The past as present in the drama of August Wilson / Harry J. Elam, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Elam, Harry Justin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Wilson, August--Criticism and interpretation.

Wilson, August.

Historical drama, American--History and criticism.

Historical drama, American.

Literature and history--United States.

Literature and history.

Criticism and interpretation.

United States.

African Americans in literature.

Physical Description:

xix, 271 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2004]

Summary:

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. As the founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam, Jr., interprets Wilson's plays in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, and race and representation, arguing that Wilson seeks to reevaluate the past in order to understand the present. Elam also places Wilson's dramatic work in the context of contemporary African American literature, and looks at the function of music in Wilson's plays and in African American history. The book also explores the important but often overlooked ways in which Wilson incorporates African mythology into his portrait of twentieth-century African American history. Elam finds that by reconnecting African Americans to narratives that have been erased, avoided, or ignored, Wilson's plays attempt a righting of American history and create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness.

Contents:

The Overture: "To Disembark" ix

Introduction: (W)righting History: A Meditation in Four Beats 1

Chapter 1 The Music Is the Message 27

Chapter 2 Fools and Babes 57

Chapter 3 The Woman Question 88

Chapter 4 Men of August 127

Chapter 5 Ogun in Pittsburgh: Resurrecting the Spirit 166

Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Resistance by Way of Conclusion 215.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-263) and index.

ISBN:

0472113682

OCLC:

52587508