Eugene O’Neill Essay

INTRODUCTION 1. 1. agate line and Development of the Statesn Literature A fundamental difference subsists amongst American writings and proximately all the other major literary traditions of the world it is essentially a youthful, recent and inter guinea pig belles-lettres.The American unspotted possessed major pre-capital of South Carolinan civilizations, with a deep herit days of refinement, mythology, ritual, chant and poesy. galore(postnominal) recent American writers, in particular recently, digest sorted to these sources as something essential to American culture, and the olympian medley and vision to be base at that place contribute much to the complexityand increasing multi culturality of Contemporary American understand. solitary(prenominal) if this is not the originating tradition of what we now ph unrivaled call American literature. That originated from the meeting amidst the shore up and usually despised Red Indians and the discoverers and settlers who remaining the developed, literatre cultures of renascence europium, runner to explore and conquer, hence to populate, what they oecumenically con perspectivered a virgin unspotted a sore World already promised them in their let mythology, now detect by their own endowment fund and curiosity.owe to the sizably voluminous immigration to Boston in the 1630s, they brought their c formerlyptions of account and the worlds tr decease they brought their languages and above all , the bulk. The book was some(prenominal) a sacred text, the Bible (to be reinvigorated in the King throng Authorized Version of 1611), and a general instrument of expression, record, argument, and cultural dissemination. In sequence, the book became American literature, and other things they shipped with it from European determine and prospects to post-Gutenberg printing technology shaped the rip of American writing.So did the early records kept of the encounter and what they composed of it. Of course a past was being ravaged as swell as an incipient typeset in gained when these travelers/ settlers imposed on the north-central American continent and its cultures their homunculuss of interpretation and communicatory, their Christian memoir and iconography. This American when for the starting signal time came into existence tabu of writing European writing and then went on to de humanityd a in the buff writing which fitted the harshness and grandeur of its landscape, the clandestine potential of its seemingly boundless free-spoken space. But America existed inEurope long before it was discovered, in the spoiled writings of the classical, the medieval and the then the Renaissance mind. He invented America a actually great man .Mademoiselle Nioche says virtually Columbus in total heat pack The American (1877). 1. 1. 1. Periods of American Literature The variableness of American literature into convenient historic segments, or periods, lacks the conse nsus among literary scholars. The many syllabi of college surveys reprinted in Reconstructing American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter (1983), and the essays in Redefining American Literary History, ed. A.LaVonne brown Ruoff and Jerry W. fightd (1990), constitute how variable ar the temporal divisions and their names, especially since the beginning of perspirations to do justice to literature written by women and by ethnic minorities. 1607-1775 This era, from the founding of the first settlement at packtown to the out control of the American Revolution, is ofttimes called the compound Period, in which writings were for the roughly part-religious, practical, or historical. William Bradford, bath Winthrop, and Cotton Mather are the famous writers. The period between 1765 and 1790 is sometimes gilded as the Revolutionary eld. It was the time of doubting doubting Thomas Paines referenceitative revolutionary tracts of Thomas Jeffersons Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, annunciation of Independence, and many other writings. The courses 1775-1828, the primal National Period, ending with the triumph of poopsonian democracy in 1828, signalized the emergence of a national imaginative literature, including the first American stage comedy (Royall Tylers The Contrast, 1787), the early American sweet (William Hill browneds The Power of Sympathy, 1789), and the establishment in 1815 of the first enduring American magazine, The North American recapitulation.Washington Irving achieved international fame with his essays and stories Charles Brockden Brown wrote classifiablely American versions of the Gothic novel of mystery and terror the career of pile Feni more Cooper, the first major American novelist, was well launched. The span 1828-1865 from the mother fuckersonian era to the civilised contend, practically identified as the sentimentalist Period in America, marks the ripe coming of age of a distinctively American literature.This period is s ometimes know as the American Renaissance, the title of F. O. Matthiessens influential book (1941) about its neat writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson,enthalpy David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne it is excessively sometimes called the Age of Transcendentalism, afterwards the philosophical and literary cause, entered on Emerson, that was prevalent allele in impertinently England. In all the major genres except gambling, writers put forwardd plant brio of an originality and excellence not exceeded in afterwards American literature.Emerson, Thoreau, and the early feminist Margaret riddled shaped the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of many present-day(a) and later American writers. It was the age not only of continuing writings by William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and jam Fennimore Cooper,but overly of the novels and curtly(p) stories of Pow, Hawthorne, Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the southern novelist William Gilmore Simms of the poetry of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the close to in advance(p) and influential of all American poets, Walt WhitmanAnd of the beginning of imposing American amateurism of Poe, Simms, and James Russell Lowell. 1865-(1914) The misfortune of the Civil War and Reconstruction, followed by a burgeoning industrialism and urbanization in the North, profoundly altered American self-awareness, and also American literary modes.The years 1865-1900 are often cognise as the Realistic Period, by fictitious character to the novels by play off bridge, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, as well as by John W. DeFo liberalization, Harold Frederic. These motions, though diverse, are often labeled vivid in argument to the romances of their predecessors in prose fiction Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Some real authors grounded their fiction in a regional surroundings these include (in addition to Mark Twains novels on the disseminated m ultiple sclerosis River region) Bret Harte in California, Sarah Orne Jewett in Maine, Mary Wilkins freeman in Massachusetts, and George W.Cable and Kate Chopin in Louisiana. Chopin has get prominent as an early and major feminist novelist. Whitman continue writing poetry up to the last decade of the century, and was join by Emily Dickinson although only seven of Dickinsons more than a thousand short poems were make in her careertime, she is now recognize as one of the most distinctive and eminent of American pets.Sidney Lanier published his experiments in versification based on the meters of medicinal drug the Afro-American author Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote both poems and novels between 1893 and 1905 and in the 1890s Stephen Crane, although he was onlytwenty-nine when he died, published short poems in free verse that endure the experiments of Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and wrote also the brilliantly innovative short stories and short novels hat look forward to two later narrative modes naturalism and impressions.The years 1900-(1914) although James, Howells, and Mark Twain were liquid writing, and Edith Wharton was publishing her earlier novelsare sometimes discriminated as the Naturalistic Period, in intuition of the powerful although sometimes inexpertly wrought novels by Frank Norris, JackLondon, and Theodore Dreiser, which typically epitomise characters who are voice victims of their instinctual drives and of external sociological forces. (1914)- 1939.The era between the two world wars, marked by the trauma of the great economic embossment beginning in 1929, was that of the emergence of what is still cognize as Modern literature, which in America reached an eminence rivaling that of the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century different most of the authors of that earlier period, however, the American modernists also achieved far-flung international recognition and influence.Poetry magazine, founded in Chicago by Harriet Monro e in 1912, published many innovative authors. Among the celebrated poets were Edgar leeward Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. E. Cummings authors who wrote in an unexampled transmutation of poetic modes. The literary productions of this era are often subclassified in a variety of ways. The flamboyant and pleasure-seeking 1920s are sometimes referred to as the contend Age, a title popularized by F.Scott Fitzgeralds Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). The same decade was also the period of the Harlem Renaissance, which produced major writings in all the literary forms. Many prominent American writers of the decade following the end of World War I, disillusioned by their war experiences and alienated by what they perceive as the crassness of American culture and its puritanical repressions, are often mark ( in a term first app lied by Gertrude Stein to young Frenchmen of the time) as the Lost Generation, a government issue of these writers became expatriates, moving either to London or toParis in their quest for a richer literary and artistic milieu and a freer way of life.1939 to the Present, the Contemporary period. World War II, and especially the disillusionment with Soviet communism consequent upon the Moscow trails for alleged swindle and Stalins signing of the Russo-German pact with Hitler in 1939, largely ended the literary radicalism of the 1930s. A final blow to the real few writers who had maintained intellectual allegiance to Soviet Russia came in 1991 with the collapse of Russian fabianism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.For several decades the crude Criticismdominated by nonprogressive southern writers. The Agrarians, who in the 1930s had championed a return from an industrial to an agricultural deliverancetypified the reign critical tendency to keep apart literature from t he life of the author and from troupe and to conceive a work of literature, in formal terms, as an organic and self-directed entity.The eminent and influential critics Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, howeveras well as other critics assort with them as the New York Intellectuals, including Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Dwight McDonald, and Irving Howecontinued finished the 1960s to deal with a work of literature humanistically and historically, in the context of its authors life, temperament and social milieu and in terms of the works moral and imaginative qualities and its consequences for society.The 1950s, while often regarded in retrospect as a period of cultural conformity and complacency, was marked by the emergence of vigorous anti-establishment and anti-traditional literary movements the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac the American exemplars of the literature of the absurd the ignominious Mountain Poets?Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Dunca n and the New York Poets, Frank OHara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. It was also a time of confessional poetry and the literature of extreme informal candor, marked by the emergence of Henry Miller as a notable author.The counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s continued some of these modes, but in a fashion made extreme and excited by the rebellious youth movement and the vehement and sometimes violent competition to the war in Vietnam. Important American writers after World War II is Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Saul Bellow, R P.Warren, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and many others. 1. 2 RISE OF AMERICAN DRAMA In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play? -Sydney Smith, The Edinburgh Review (1820). This was the most profoundly preconceived vox populi around the world before the time of American Drama among many literary critics as well as the literate people, half of those harsh comments were due to cheque and the remaining were sort of ill-treatment.There is not, and there never has been, a literary institution,which could be called the American Drama Dion Boucicault This statement upraise very little argument from most American critics more than a degree centigrade years later. In fact, the neglect of American frolic is so pervasive that chromatic Cohn, in her history of twentieth-century turn for the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), begins with the comment Given the chokehold on turn of a misnamed Broadway, prone the lure of Hollywood, and given the power of some small-minded reviewers in the daily press, it is a virtual miracle that American frolic merits admission to a history of American literature. disdain its separationism from the main corpus of American literature, American gambol has never been written in a vaccum. It has mirrored peculiarly American social, political, and historical issues in tradition al as well as challenging forms and data-based styles. It has been the forum for a plurality of American voices. American drama has always responded to national and regional problems, either in reifying prevailing sentiments or by challenging dominant ideologies. Like other forms of American literature, drama embodies the American struggle.For decades scholars and critics of American literature, engaged in establishing discipline withcanonical hierarchies and feeling embattled in the face of longer-lived English literary studies, keep practiced generic hegemony as a consequence, American drama historically has been the most devalued and overlooked sphere of influence in American literary studies. at any rate all these, there was great theatrical performance activity during the nineteenth century a time when there were no movies, TV, or Radio. Every town of any coat of it had its theater of operations or opera kinsperson in which touring companies of histrions performed. Howe ver, no significant drama was performed in this century, with audiences preferring farce, melodrama, and vaudeville to undecomposed efforts.European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, matured in the last third base of 19th century with the achievements of three playwrights Henrik Ibsen, wonderful Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov. Ibsen who was profoundly influenced by psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness. Strindberg brought to his characterizations a unprecedented come to aim of psychological complexity. And Chekhov shifted the subject matter of drama from wildly theatrical displays of external motion and emotions to the concerns of everyday life.These trio presented characters and situations more or less realistically chiefly known as slice-of-life dramatic technique. Soon after the beginning of the 20th century, pragmatism became the dominant mode of American drama. Very currentl y after the little theaters off Broadway succeeded with realistic plays. In 1916 and 1917, two small theater multitudes in New York (the Provincetown Players and the Washington squarely Players) began to produce new American plays. They provided a congenial home for new American playwrights like Eugene ONeill, whose first plays were produced by the Provincetown Players in MA.These small play groups would produce any play, in any style, that mercantile theater would not touch. These groups were the beginning of modern American dramatic theater. The post- World War II years brought two main(prenominal) figures to prominence in American drama Arthur Miller (((1916))-2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). They remain the dominant figures of the scrap half of the 20th century. Miller and Williams represent the two principal movement in modern American drama reality, and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative.From the beginning, American playwrights have tried to breakaway from the strict realism of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and to endure it with a more poetic form of expression. Millers Death of a Salesman (1949),Williams The Glass Menagerie (1944) and Thornton Wilders Our Town (1938) are some of the trump out examples of this style of writing. Contemporary American mansion In the mid 19th century, realism in drama was conceived as a revolt against crude theatricalism.Currently there is a revolt against realism itself and a move toward more theatricalism, with its emphasis on stage effects and imaginative settings. erstwhile again, Americandrama is changing to mull the changing attitudes of American theater-going audiences. Dramatists today have the freedom to express their deepest feelings, whatever they may be, in any form they choose- provided that their approach can be made graspable to an audience and touch their emotions. 1. 3 feel AND CAREER OF EUGENE ONEILL I was born(p) in a hotel and, damn it, Ill die in a hotel- Eugene ONeill Eugene Gladstone ONeill (16- October- 1888 to 27- November-1953), the son of James ONeill and Ella Quinlan was born in an up-town family hotel, named Barret kinfolk on broadway at 43, Street, New York.James ONeill, was a successful touring actor in the last quarter of the 19th century whose most famous character reference was that of the Count of Monte Cristo in a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel. Ella accompanied her economise all the times except for the brook of her first son, James younger. and for Eugene. His parents were ardent participator of Catholicism. Ella was exceptionally beautiful woman. She loved music and practiced a curled hand-writing. As he was born in a hotel, he spent his childhood in hotel rooms, on trains and backstage. This filled him with a palpate of instability and insecurity.ONeill later deplored the incubus insecurity of these early years experience and blamed his father for the tragedies that happened in the life of ONeill. Wherever he (ONeill) lived, the houses he bought were always big, as if their very size would ensure stability the other side of the picture is, of course, to be seen in his ungratified experimentation, which ever allowed him exactly to repeat a way of writing he had once essayed. ONeill was educated at embarkment crops such as Mt. St. Vincent in the Bronx and Betts honorary society in Stamford, Conn. His summers were spent at the familys only permanent home, a mild house overlooking the Thames River in New London.He attended Princeton University for one year (1906-07), after which he left school to begin what he later regarded as his real education in life experience. The next six years very nearly ended his life. He shipped to sea, lived a derelicts existence on the waterfronts of Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York City, submerged himself in alcohol, and act suicide. Recovering briefly at the age of 24, he held a job for a few months as a newsperson and contr ibutor to the poetry column of the New London Telegraph but shortly came with tuberculosis.Confined to the Gaylord Farm Sanitarium in Wallingford for six months then he confronted himself badly and seized the chance for what he later called his conversion. ONeills first efforts were incompetent melodramas, but they were about people and subjectsprostitutes, derelicts, nongregarious sailors, Gods injustice to manthat had, up to that time, been in the province of serious novels and were not considered an apt subjects for presenting on the American Stage. In the autumn of (1914), ONeill entered G. P. bakers Academy at Harvard to take lessons in playwriting, because of a bailiwick critic suggestion to his father.ONeills first appearance as a playwright came in the summer of 1916, in the unperturbed fishing village of Provincetown, where a group of young writers and painters had launced an experimental theater. In their tiny, creaky playhouse on a wharf, they produced his one-ac t sea play Bound easterly for Cardiff. The talent inherent in the play was presently evident to the group, which that fall formed the playwrights Theater in Greenwich village. Their first bill, on 03-November-1916, included Bound East for CardiffONeills one-act sea plays, on with a flesh of his lesser efforts.By the time his first full aloofness play, Beyond the Horizon? was produced on Broadway, ordered in Morosco Theater, when the young playwright already had a small reputation. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and they lived for several summers at peaked(p) Hill, a reconditioned life-saving station near Provincetown. During the equilibrium of the year, they lived in other places. They had two children before separating in 1827. His third wife, Carlotta Montercy, accompanied him on many long journeys, to Europe, to Asia, to the American West.They were to be frequently on the move during the rest of ONeills life, and they were to experience manypainful things including th e suicide of Eugene O Neill Jr. ONeills last years were marked by physical throe ( his hands paralysed so that he could no longer write), by increasing isolation, by family trouble and dissension. He died on 27 November, 1953. 1. 4 ONeills persona to American Drama In his own life-time, ONeill was established as the starring(p) American dramatist. He was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, gothic Interlude, and Long daytimes Journey into shadow( he received the highest international recognition in the award of theNobel Prize in Literature a considerable number of books and articles have been devoted to his work since the nineteen-twenties, and in recent years the sign of reside has grown markedly pronounced.His plays are quite an popular in the English-speaking world. Despite some critical effort to underrate ONeill, he remains Americas outstanding playwright, the only one to win international fame and recognition, and the Novel Prize. He not only built up the American theatre, but also put it on the world map, where now it has a dynamic and distinguished place beside the European and continental theatreArthur Miller andTennessee Williams support to sustain that edifice.Unlike Shakespeare, whom popular accept depicts as a wild biddy who sat on the bough and warbled his wood-notes wild, ONeill had the theatre in his blood and made a lifelong strenuous conscious effort to achieve glory in this field of operations and leave foot-prints on the sands of time. Also, unlike Shakespeare, ONeill was a highly individualized writer, in whose case the partions that divide autobiography and objective reality are very thin paper thin so that his dramatic works constitute a series of personal obsessions, ending up with the most personal of them all- Long Days Journey into Night.Full-length plays starting line AND BUTTER, (1914) SERVITUDE, (1914) THE PERSONAL EQUATION, (1916) NOW I strike YOU, 1916 BEYOND THE HORIZON, 1918 PULITZER PRIZE, (1920) THE STRAW, (1919) CHRIS CHRISTOPHERSEN, (1919) GOLD, (1920) ANNA CHRISTIE, (1920) PULITZER PRIZE, (1922) THE EMPEROR JONES, (1920) DIFFRENT, (1921) THE initial MAN, (1922) THE shock-headed APE, (1922) THE FOUNTAIN, (1923) MARCO MILLIONS, (192325) ALL GODS CHILLUN GOT WINGS, (1924) WELDED, (1924) appetency UNDER THE ELMS, (1925) LAZARUS LAUGHED, (192526) THE GREAT GOD BROWN, (1926) freaky INTERLUDE, (1928 PULITZER PRIZE)DYNAMO, (1929) MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, (1931) AH, WILDERNESS , (1933) DAYS WITHOUT END, (1933) THE iceman COMETH, (WRITTEN 1939, PUBLISHED 1940, FIRST PERFORMED 1946) HUGHIE, WRITTEN (1941, FIRST PERFORMED 1959) LONG DAYS tour INTO NIGHT, (WRITTEN 1941, FIRST PERFORMED 1956 PULITZER PRIZE 1957) A woolgather FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, (WRITTEN 19411943, FIRST PERFORMED 1947)A TOUCH OF THE POET, (COMPLETED IN 1942, FIRST PERFORMED 1958) MORE STATELY MANSIONS, (SECOND blueprint FOUND IN ONEILLS PAPERS, FIRST PERFORMED 1967) THE CALMS OF CAPRICORN, (P UBLISHED IN 1983) One-act playsThe Glencairn Plays, all of which cause characters on the fictional ship Glencairn record together as The Long voyage Home BOUND EAST FOR CARDIFF, ((1914)) IN THE ZONE, (1917) THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, (1917) MOON OF THE CARIBBEES, (1918) former(a) one-act plays include A WIFE FOR A LIFE, (1913) THE WEB, (1913) THIRST, (1913) RECKLESSNESS, (1913) WARNINGS, (1913) FOG, (1914) ABORTION, (1914)THE MOVIE MAN A COMEDY, (1914) THE SNIPER, (1916) earlier BREAKFAST, (1916) ILE, (1917) THE ROPE, (1918) SHELL SHOCK, (1918) THE DREAMY KID, (1918) WHERE THE CROSS IS MADE, (1918) legal ouster (1919) 1. 5 His Themes.