Drawing together 13 original theoretical perspectives on one of America's most important contemporary playwrights, this book represents a range of critical approaches - including semiotics, deconstruction and feminism. The essays address recent debates emerging in Shepard criticism. These include the status of Shepard's texts within the modernist tradition on the one hand and a developing post-modernism on the other, and the feminist debate over Shepard's drama - does it reinforce a masculinist world, or does it provide some oppositional stance toward patriarchal "master narratives"?