Glancing at Dramatists' Dialogue

Ruby Cohn (1922 - 2011) was for 30 years at UC Davis, where she was a member of the comparative literature and theatre departments and affiliated with the English and French departments. She taught courses on modern and experimental drama, Shakespeare’s legacies in modern drama, dramatic genres, and Samuel Beckett and his contemporaries. She was one of the foremost authorities on the work of Samuel Beckett and published a number of books on his work, including A Beckett Canon (2001).Daniela Caselli is Professor of Modern Literature in the English Department at the University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Insufferable: Beckett, Gender and Sexuality (2023), Improper Modernism: Djuna Barnes’s Bewildering Corpus (2009) and Beckett’s Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (2005). She edited Beckett and Nothing in 2010. Her work has appeared in Comparative Literature (2017), Parallax (2016), The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature (2015), and Feminist Theory (2010).Hannah Simpson is Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the English Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama (2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (2022). She has edited special issues for Twentieth Century Literature, Medical Humanities and the Journal of War and Culture Studies, serves as the Theatre Review Editor for The Beckett Circle at the Samuel Beckett Society.

• Introduction (Daniela Caselli and Hannah Simpson)Note on the Text (Daniela Caselli and Hannah Simpson)Foreword (Ruby Cohn)Chapter 1: Shakespeare’s Dialogue in a Comedy and a Tragedy: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Timon of AthensChapter 2: Restoration Genteel Comedies: William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, and William Congreve’s The Way of the WorldChapter 3: Beguiled by Wilde: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, and Mark Ravenhill’s HandbagChapter 4: Pinter Between PausesChapter 5: Chameleon Caryl ChurchillChapter 6: Erotic and Erratic Triangles: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Samuel Beckett’s Play, Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 PsychosisChapter 7: The Word is my ShepardChapter 8: Two Generations of Dialogic Imagination: Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks