Staging Modern American Life

THOMAS FAHY Director of the American Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at Long Island University, USA.

• I Cannot live without a Macaroon!': Food, Hunger, and the Dangers of Modern American Culture in Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo and Other Plays 'Damn Everything but the Circus!': The Ambiguous Place of Popular Culture in E. E. Cummings' Him Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: Technology and the Suburban Nightmare in the Plays of John Dos Passos

"An intelligent, extremely well written study, Fahy's text expands our knowledge of the subject. He enables us to understand better the non-realistic (expressionist, maybe even post-modern) theater in America as well as to understand the writers themselves." - Townsend Ludington, author of John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey and The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos"As Fahy points out, these plays and playwrights have been marginalized by readers and scholars alike. Nevertheless, Fahy proves how relevant these works are; all of these artists challenged contemporary perceptions of class, race, and sexuality. Fahy s insights are extremely perceptive, and he is not only influenced by famous critics, such as Bahktin, Cohn, Foucault, Pizer, and Nicoll, but also by major new authorities such as Bay-Cheng, Kasson, Ludington, and Wagner-Martin. A fine contribution to literary scholarship." - Kimball King, Professor Emeritus of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill