The theatre of Eugene O'Neill: American modernism on the world stage

1. O'Neill's American Theatre: Modernism Against Modernity

Modernism and tradition

Youthful mentors: Nietzsche and Strindberg

Modernism contra modernity

An American modernism

Melodrama as modernity

Prophesying a modern American stage

From Harvard to Greenwich Village

After Provincetown

Journeying into the past

2. A Modernist in the Making : O'Neill Before Broadway

An early "skit"

First publication: Testing the waters

Trying the longer form: Two early portraits of an artist

Finding his voice

Among the bohemians

The homeless life at sea

Haunted by the primitive sea

Staging suicide

After the revolution

3. Tragedy and the Postrevolutionary Condition

Youthful revolutionary verse and drama

Yank's personal revolution in The Hairy Ape

Defying empire in Lazarus Laughed

Days Without End: A failed revolution of the soul

A touch of the revolutionary: The American history cycle

Revolution as pipe dream: The Iceman Cometh

4. New Women, Male Destinies: The "Woman Plays"

Early portraits: Now I Ask You and The Straw

Women and marriage in three plays of the early 1920s

Her own boss: Anna Christie

O'Neill's "woman play"

Dynamo and the modern goddess

A Moon for the Misbegotten: The limits of female representation

5. "Souls under Skins": Masks, Race, and the Divided American Self

Modernity as double consciousness

Up from blackface: The Dreamy Kid

A nation's alienated history: The Emperor Jones

All God's Chillun Got Wings: Race and American modernity

The Fountain and Marco Millions as mirrors of modernity

The play of masks in The Great God Brown

Unmasking Irishness in A Touch of the Poet

6. Transience and Tradition: O'Neill's Modern Families

Filial strife in The Rope and Exorcism

Remaking the dramatic family: Beyond the Horizon

Removing the walls: Desire Under the Elms

Family as mask in Mourning Becomes Electra

The happy modernism of Ah, Wilderness!

Homelessness in Long Day's Journey Into Night

7. Critical Perspectives

O'Neill: Biography, Autobiography, and Standing in for Eugene (G.) O'Neill / William Davies King

The Literary O'Neill / Alexander Pettit

O'Neill's Emperor Jones: Racing the Great White Way / Katie N. Johnson

Tony Kushner's O'Neill: Seeking Meaning on Marblehead Neck / Sheila Hickey Garvey

Conclusion: O'Neill After O'Neill

Conjuring the dead

The Experimental Theatre, cont.

A global legacy

A continuing dialogue.