Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet - Hardcover

CHRIS HUDGINS has taught at Old Dominion University, at Emory University, and at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was Chair of the English Department for nine years. Hudgins has written widely on David Mamet, Harold Pinter and Stanley Kubrick, and is co-founder with Leslie Kane of The David Mamet Society and co-editor, again with Kane, of The David Mamet Review. He is also a founding member and Vice President of The Harold Pinter Society where he is on the Editorial Board of Harold Pinter: Annual Essays. He has served as Chair of the Nevada Humanities Committee, as a member of the State Commission for Cultural Affairs, and as a member of the Board of Directors of Cities of Refuge, Las Vegas, the first U.S. affiliate of International PEN's program for the benefit of politically persecuted writers.

LESLIE KANE is Professor of English at Westfield State College. She is the author of The Language of Silence: On the Unspoken and the Unspeakable in Modern Drama and Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet. She has edited David Mamet: A Casebook; Israel Horovitz: A Collection of Critical Essays; "Glengarry Glen Ross": Text and Performance; and David Mamet in Conversation. President of the David Mamet Society and co-editor of The David Mamet Review, Kane's essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Pinter Review, American Drama, American Theatre, Theatre Journal, and The Yearbook of English Studies and in collections of critical essays.

Critical and popular debate about Mamet's work often centres on whether we should read his misogynist, unloving characters as reflecting his own misogyny or should recognize a Mametian irony in his memorable depictions. Irony is intimately related to issues of genre and to audience expectations. In turn, Mamet's celebrity colours responses to his work. The essays in this collection approach these controversial topics of gender and genre with verve, ranging from those which cast Mamet as a macho misogynist to those which understand his work as deeply ironic and even feminist. Topics include plays from the early "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" to the "Jolly" of more recent times, two films, "House of Games" and "Homicide", and Mamet's first novel, "The Village".