Illusion And Reality In Eugene O Neill S The Iceman Cometh And Long Day S Journey Into Night

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Eugene O'Neill, language: English, abstract: The Iceman Cometh (published in 1940) and Long Day's Journey into Night (published in 1956 after O'Neill's death) are widely recognized to be two of Eugene O'Neill's best plays. Both belong to his late plays and apart from that bear a lot of similarities. The focus of this paper will be to analyze The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey into Night with special regard to the importance of illusion and reality for both the characters and the progress of the play. Furthermore a comparison will be made between Hickey in The Iceman Cometh and Mary Cavan Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night in order to show that they have similar functions in their respective plays. Finally a conclusion will be given which will sum up the argumentation.

Presents a collection of critical essays on O'Neill's play, arranged in chronological order of their original publication.

Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies

Critic Clive Barnes once called Eugene O'Neill the "world's worst great playwright" and Brooks Atkinson called him "a tragic dramatist with a great knack for old-fashioned melodrama." These descriptions of the man can also be used to describe his work. Despite the fact that O'Neill is the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his last works are some of America's finest, most of his published works are not good. This work closely examines how O'Neill's failures as a playwright are inspiring and how his disappointments are reflections of his own theory that tragedy requires failure, a theory that is evident in his work. Conflicts in O'Neill's plays are studied at the structural level, with attention paid to genre, language or dialogue, characters, space and time elements, and action. Included is information about O'Neill's life and a chronological listing of all of his 50 plays with basic details such as production history, principal characters, dramatic action, and a brief commentary.

Unprecedented changes appear to be occurring more often and more rapidly than ever before. We notice these changes and events more readily due to the advent of the information age and the continual technological innovation that has accompanied it. New methods of the manufacture and the dissemination of information expose us to crises in ways previously impossible. These crises often lead to the exposure of new ways of understanding. The lifting of veils allows us to see these crises more clearly. In turn, these epiphanies invite imaginative and creative responses. This volume interprets this situation in a new way—not just as an examination of what happens to us and the variety of crises we face, but the way in which we understand them. How do we produce new ways of thinking and discussing crises? What is the role of imagination in both the description of crisis and the response to it? How are we changed and how do we change our thinking and writing as a result? There are two sides of the veil, with crisis on one side and imagination on the other. The issue of lifting veils—of revelatory change—expresses the contributors’ interest in the intersection of and collaboration between different disciplines. As an interdisciplinary project, this book takes a new approach in discussing our current condition. Lifting the veil radically undoes the past, opens us to the future through change, and provides the possibility for vision and hope.

The new essays in this collection, on such diverse writers as Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, Maurine Dallas Watkins, Sophie Treadwell, and Washington Irving, fill an important conceptual gap. The essayists offer numerous approaches to intertextuality: the influence of the poetry of romanticism and Shakespeare and of histories and novels, ideological and political discourses on American playwrights, unlikely connections between such writers as Miller and Wilder, the problems of intertexts in translation, the evolution in historical and performance contexts of the same tale, and the relationships among feminism, the drama of the courtroom, and the drama of the stage. Intertextuality has been an under-explored area in studies of dramatic and performance texts. The innovative findings of these scholars testify to the continuing vitality of research in American drama and performance.

Eugene O'Neill is the only American dramatist ever to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote over 50 plays; a number are virtually unknown by the general public; several are considered classics of the American stage; all of them demonstrate, in one way or another, how O'Neill challenged the conventional boundaries of the drama of his time and thereby paved the way for modern American theatre. This volume will provide guides to eight of O'Neill's plays that are most often studied in schools and colleges: The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms, Ah, Wilderness!, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. More than almost any other author in any fictional genre, O'Neill's works are highly autobiographical. The love/hate relationships he had with the members of his own family resonate throughout his dramatic works. The son of an alcoholic and a morphine addict, he struggled with chemical dependency throughout his life, but determined to be an artist or nothing, he eventually gave up drinking and fulfilled his artistic ambitions, transforming the traumatic experiences of his life into compelling drama. O'Neill's drama provides insights into the complexities of human behavior and raises questions about the forces, both external and internal, that shape human lives.