Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Hagood, Taylor

Abstract

As current scholarship has begun to revisit African American theater, there has been an important rediscovery of certain women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance. Coinciding with this rediscovery has been a tendency, however, to retain the often confusing and oppressive label that has haunted their plays and kept them from serious scholarly attention. Evoking categorizations like "folk drama" and "propaganda plays" oversimplifies the complexities of the terms themselves as well as what the individual women were doing in their writing. The primary focus of this study is to evaluate and recuperate the functions of the term "folk drama" as it operates within the realm of Harlem Renaissance drama, especially that of African American female playwrights. Reassessing "folk drama" reveals that the form is more intricate, historically and theatrically, than the label has heretofore suggested.

Extent

70 p.

Comments

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

Identifier

FA00000913

Format

pdf

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