Susan Keating Glaspell, The Outside: A Play in One Act

Noelia Hernando-Real (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: J. Michael Duvall (College of Charleston), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Tony Papanikolas (San Jose State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1917

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

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The Outside

premiered during the second New York Season of the Provincetown Players (1917-1918), and it is Glaspell's fifth play, the third she wrote on her own. The play includes all the stylistic elements that characterize Glaspell's

oeuvre

: marginal female protagonists, symbolic struggles between opposed forces, and experimentation with language. With this play Glaspell marked a stark disjunction towards a theatrical form that she had not displayed so overtly in her previous works, and which has made critics see in her a forerunner of Beckett's or Camus's absurdist plays (Bigsby 14, Sarlós 256).

As she had done in Trifles, Glaspell favoured again the one-act form, a general agreement among the Provincetown Players to use this form as the medium to test innovative aesthetic expressions

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2208 words

Citation: Hernando-Real, Noelia. "The Outside: A Play in One Act". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 20 August 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=15997, accessed 25 April 2024.]

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