Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, and: Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression: Language and Isolation in the Plays (review)

Over the past quarter century, the writings of Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) have attracted the interest of a burgeoning, international group of scholars and artists. In the last decade, her plays Suppressed Desires (1915), Trifles (1915), The Outside (1917), Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), Chains of Dew (1922), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Alison's House (1930) have seen professional revivals in London, Washington, D.C., and New York; these and other works have also been staged at universities, conferences, and festivals across the United States, as well as in China, Israel, Brazil, and elsewhere. And, since 2000, a series of scholarly monographs focusing on her drama and fiction, numerous articles, and two critical biographies have also appeared to provide new theoretical, historical, and cultural perspectives on her life and work.

Authors of these more recent volumes and essays all acknowledge the importance of earlier, foundational scholarship on Glaspell, grounded in women's studies and feminist theory. The "rediscovery" of women writers and related interrogations of theatre historiography and literary canon-formation that began in the late 1960s opened the door to Glaspell's re-emergence from critical and creative obscurity. In the early decades of the twentieth century, critics had identified Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill as America's two foremost playwrights, and she was seen internationally as an important contributor to the "new drama" of Ibsen, Shaw, and other modernists. Her award-winning short fiction and best-selling novels further established her as a prominent writer with a particular affinity for the regionalism that defined the American literature of the era. Nevertheless, her critical standing, like that of so many other women artists, declined with the advent of New Criticism and other academic and cultural movements that held sway throughout much of the twentieth century.

With the publication of Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo's edited volume, Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, Kristina Hinz-Bode's monograph, Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression: Language and Isolation in the Plays, and Carpentier's 2006 edited volume, Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry (not reviewed here), Glaspell studies has entered an important new phase. As the title of Carpentier's later collection suggests, Glaspell scholars are currently exploring a range of critical and theoretical approaches to her oeuvre and expanding their scope of inquiry beyond the more frequently studied Glaspell texts (especially her one-act play Trifles and its short story counterpart "A Jury of Her Peers") as well as towards the intersections of Glaspell's artistry and that of other modernists.

Carpentier and Ozieblo invoke the concept of intertextuality, drawing on Kristeva's reading of Bakhtin, to position Glaspell and her writing both synchronically – within her own cultural moment and in the context of the work of her contemporaries – and diachronically, across the arc of her career (10). The essays and critical introduction that comprise Disclosing Intertextualities especially seek to establish stronger connections between Glaspell's drama and her fiction, which scholars have generally treated separately. The editors rightly note that Glaspell moved "between genres with a unique fluidity" (17), and, indeed, Glaspell's treatment of related narratives and themes in both fictional and dramatic texts opens a rare window into the creative process, revealing the distinctive or shared structures, techniques, and – important in Glaspell's case – modernist experiments with language and form that she developed in each medium.

Carpentier, the author of the first full-length study of Glaspell's major novels (2001) and Ozieblo, author of one of the two recent critical biographies (2000), are well positioned to oversee this expansion of Glaspell studies. Working...