Size: 6 x 9
Pages: 152
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Literary Studies
Understanding Contemporary American Literature
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Understanding Sam Shepard

James A. Crank

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978-1-61117-106-8
Published: Oct 22 2012

$54.99

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978-1-61117-187-7
Published: Oct 12 2012

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978-1-61117-187-7
Published: Oct 12 2012

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An ideal introduction into the complex and compelling dramas of the acclaimed playwright

Understanding Sam Shepard investigates the notoriously complex and confusing dramatic world of Sam Shepard, one of America's most prolific, thoughtful, and challenging contemporary playwrights. During his nearly fifty-year career as a writer, actor, director, and producer, Shepard has consistently focused his work on the ever-changing American cultural landscape. James A. Crank's comprehensive study of Shepard offers scholars and students of the dramatist a means of understanding Shephard's frequent experimentation with language, setting, characters, and theme.

Beginning with a brief biography of Shepard, Crank shows how experiences in Shepard's life eventually resonate in his work by exploring the major themes, unique style, and history of Shepard's productions. Focusing first on Shepard's early plays, which showcase highly experimental, frenetic explorations of fractured worlds, Crank discusses how the techniques from these works evolve and translate into the major works in his "family trilogy": Curse of the Starving Class, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child, and True West. Shepard often uses elements from his past—his relationship with his father, his struggle for control within the family, and the breakdown of the suburban American dream—as major starting points in his plays.

Shepard is a recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, eleven Obie Awards, and a Chicago Tribune Literary Prize for Lifetime Achievement. Augmented with an extensive bibliography, Understanding Sam Shepard is an ideal point of entrance into complex and compelling dramas of this acclaimed playwright.

James A. Crank is associate professor of American literature at the University of Alabama, a former National Humanities Center Summer Fellow, and cohost of the podcast "The Sound and the Furious." His other books include Understanding Randall Kenan, New Approaches to Gone with the Wind, and Race and New Modernisms. Crank has written on artists as diverse as James Agee, Sherman Alexie, and Eudora Welty.

"Written with great lucidity and wearing its considerable erudition lightly, Understanding Sam Shepard is the perfect introduction to Shepard for both beginning and advanced students of American drama. Because of its subtlety and depth of textual analysis, the book is equally valuable for the scholar. James A. Crank unearths Shepard's buried children and their cursed families in all their complexity and mystery, making a compelling case for the unity and profundity of Shepard's mythic vision of America."—Henry I. Schvey, professor of drama and comparative literature, Washington University in St. Louis

"Written with great lucidity and wearing its considerable erudition lightly, Understanding Sam Shepard is the perfect introduction to Shepard for both beginning and advanced students of American drama. Because of its subtlety and depth of textual analysis, the book is equally valuable for the scholar. James A. Crank unearths Shepard's buried children and their cursed families in all their complexity and mystery, making a compelling case for the unity and profundity of Shepard's mythic vision of America"—Henry I. Schvey, professor of drama and comparative literature, Washington University in St. Louis

Understanding Sam Shepard

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