Bücher von Peter Wolfe

The theatrical world Terence Rattigan built is vital but disturbing and uniquely constructed. His sentences are not impacted or fractured, and his plots usually obey a linear time sequence. Yet his realism isnt all that real. Though sentence by sentence, his dialogue sounds natural, the creative pulse behind it is idiosyncratic and self-lacerating. As a gay man writing at a time when homosexuality was a felony in the UK, Rattigan wrote at a skewed angle to his culture, making his plays at times easy to follow but hard to fathom. Terence Rattigan: The Playwright as Battlefield examines the ways in which Rattigan's works turn their audiences into participants, encouraging intellectual independence and freeing them to make decisions for themselves as to the deeper meanings of the works. The playwright's omission of outright explanations deepens the audience's emotional commitment to the outcomes of the performance, and walks a fine line between restraint and invention. His works convey subtly and deceptively the cold obstinacy that thwarts our everyday actions in a way which that is felt viscerally by the audience. This book engages works from throughout Rattigan's early and late career to examine the unique methods by which the playwright conveys meaning to various audiences within an ever-changing sociocultural context.

Examines Simon Gray's legacy from the early plays, which hack away at the formalism and humanism of traditional English satire, to the later ones, in which he explores English professionals and their problems connecting with each other. If Gray remains the least known major English dramatist of his day, he's also one of the boldest and best.

James Ellroy's prose, in many ways as complex as any in the Western literary canon, strung together sensational stories of crime and catastrophe. The significance of his writing to Western culture has yet to be fully explored. Author Peter Wolfe offers us the first book-length study of Ellroy in English.

Havoc in the Hub examines the long-neglected work of George V. Higgins, bringing to light the wealth of intellectual, social, literary, and religious thought that underlie his 25 novels and numerous other writings.