Research Guides: Trifles: eBooks

Electronic Books

"Trifles" in Drama for Students
Call Number: ebook
Publication Date: 2000
Includes an overview of play, brief biography of playwright, plot summary, discussion of play's principal themes, essays on play's construction, and excerpted critical commentary.
Disclosing Intertextualities by Martha C. Carpentier (Volume Editor); Barbara Ozieblo (Volume Editor)
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9789042020832
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
For the first time, this volume brings together essays by feminist, Americanist, and theater scholars who apply a variety of sophisticated critical approaches to Susan Glaspell's entire oeuvre. Glaspell's one-act play, "Trifles," and the short story that she constructed from it, "A Jury of Her Peers," have drawn the attention of many feminist critics, but the rest of her writing--the short stories, plays and novels--is largely unknown. The essays gathered here will allow students of literature, women's studies and theater studies an insight into the variety and scope of her oeuvre.Glaspell's political and literary thinking was radicalized by the turbulent Greenwich Village environment of the first decades of the twentieth century, by progressive-era social movements and by modernist literary and theatrical innovation.
Literary Contexts in Plays: Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" by McDaniel, L. Bailey
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9781429820639
Publication Date: 2006
The essay presents a summary and analysis of Susan Glaspell's 1920 play "Trifles." In addition to considering the cultural relevance of the play, its author, her larger body of work, and the real-life incident on which the drama is based, this essay considers the socio-historical components tangential to the play itself. In this one-act play depicting the actual events of a rural Iowa farmwife (Margaret Hossack) and the husband she allegedly murdered in 1900, Glaspell introduces the key themes of gender inequality and the hardships of life in the rural Midwest at the turn of the century. Any final outcome of the murder or a trial is not provided by the play's conclusion; consequently, rather than merely focusing on a legal decision, Glaspell is able to highlight the difficult conditions for women leading up to the crime and the gender hierarchies of its aftermath.
Plays by Susan Glaspell by C. W. E. Bigsby (Editor); Susan Glaspell; Martin Banham (Contribution by); Peter Thomson (Contribution by)
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 0521312043
Publication Date: 1987-07-02
A cofounder of the Provincetown Players - the group that acted as midwife to the American theatre - Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) can also lay claim to be a major figure in her own right. Her early plays were in many respects as challenging and original as those with which O'Neill made his debut. Her concern with language as subject, with character as an expression of social role, with plot as a mechanism that may ensnare rather than locate the self, mode her very much a modern. In Trifles (1916) she developed a feminist critique of social role. In The Outside (1917) she staged a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In both plays silence becomes an eloquent expression of meaning. The Verge (1921) is an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. Though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional it touched a contemporary nerve, questioning the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known only for a single play, Susan Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative daring.
Susan Glaspell by Linda Ben-Zvi
Call Number: ebook
ISBN: 9780195115062
Publication Date: 2005-04-28
"Venturesome feminist," historian Nancy Cott's term, perfectly describes Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), America's first important modern female playwright, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and one of the most respected novelists and short story writers of her time. In her life she explored uncharted regions and in her writing she created intrepid female characters who did the same.

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