1st Edition

Horton Foote A Casebook

Edited By Gerald C. Wood Copyright 1998

    This study is the first general critical introduction to the writing of Horton Foote, recipient of two Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. These original essays survey Foote's career, his work for theater, television, and film, with analysis of Foote's major themes and characteristic style in all three media. The casebook concludes with a list of Foote's produced work, as well as a selective annotated bibliography of primary criticism on the playwright. This book demonstrates the influence of personal biography and Southern literature on Foote's career. The essayists also investigate the writer's contribution to American dramatic realism and independent filmmaking, emphasizing his experimentation with musical structure, dedramatization, and complex subtexts. Foote's disarmingly simple stories, with their radically understated language, are explained in many articles as the product of the subtle influence of the psychological and religious views of the author.

    Introduction * Chronology * Biographical/Contextual Essays * Remembering Wharton, Texas, Marion Castleberry * Horton Foote's TV Women, Terry Barr * Southern Accents: Horton Foote's Adaptations of William Faulkner, Harper Lee, and Flannery O'Connor, Rebecca Briley * Perspectives on Style/Themes * More Real than Realism: Horton Foote's Impressionism, Tim Wright * To Be Quiet and Listen: The Orphans' Home Cycle and the Music of Charles Ives, Crystal Brian * Subtext as Text: Language and Culture in Horton Foote's Texas Cycle, Laurin Porter * Performing The Death of Papa: A Review, Kimball King, Horton Foote's Film Aesthetic, S. Dixon McDowell * The Signature Theatre Series Texture in Horton Foote's MTalking Pictures, Susan Underwood, Boundaries, the Female Will, and Individuation in Night Seasons, Gerald C. Wood * The Nature of Mystery in The Young Man from Atlanta, Gerald C. Wood * Squeezing the Drama out of Melodrama: Plot and Counterplot in Laura Dennis, Dean Mendell * Bibliography, Index

    Biography

    Gerald C. Wood

    "This casebook finally provides the overview students and scholars have been needing. A treasure trove for those who already admire Foote-and a great introduction for those who barely know him. A must for all academic and public libraries." -- Choice