Orphans' home : the voice and vision of Horton Foote
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Orphans' home : the voice and vision of Horton Foote
（Southern literary studies）
Louisiana State University Press, c2003
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 8 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [215]-218) and index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: cloth ISBN 9780807128459
Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, an Emmy-winning television writer, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter of such notable films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, the amazingly versatile Horton Foote has been a force on the American cultural scene for more than fifty years. By critical consensus, Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle - a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays that traces the transformation of a small-town southern orphan, Horace Robedaux, into a husband, father, and patriarch. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Foote, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama. Set in the fictitious town of Harrison, Texas, and based partly on the childhood of Foote's father and the courtship and marriage of his parents, the cycle is a wide-ranging, intricate work reminiscent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga. Porter shows how the small-town southern culture speaks through Horace while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation.
She explains that Foote's signature sparse style creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. In comparing the cycle with the works of William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of southern literature and American drama. Porter concludes that for Foote, home is not a place but a geography of the heart. Her definitive Orphans' Home shines much-needed light on an understudied talent who proves to be a vital American voice.
Table of Contents
- An orphan's dream
- Horace, son and father - the role of family in shaping identity
- Cultural influences - community, language, and identity
- Polyphonic voices - repetition and the multiplication of meaning
- Point-counterpoint - paired plays, multiple perspectives
- The presence of the past - the orphans' home cycle and the nature of time
- An orphans' home - family, place, and redemption.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780807128794
Description
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, an Emmy-winning television writer, and an Oscar-winning screenwriter of such notable films as To Kill a Mockingbird, Tender Mercies, and A Trip to Bountiful, the amazingly versatile Horton Foote has been a force on the American cultural scene for more than fifty years. By critical consensus, Foote's foremost achievement is The Orphans' Home Cycle - a course of nine independent yet interlocking plays that traces the transformation over twenty-six years of a small-town southern orphan, Horace Robedaux, into a husband, father, and patriarch. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with Foote, Laurin Porter demonstrates why the author's masterpiece is a unique accomplishment not only in his personal oeuvre but also in the canon of American drama.
Set in and near Harrison, Texas, the fictitious counterpart to Foote's native Wharton, and based partly on his father's childhood and his parents' courtship and marriage, the plays introduce two extended families - those of Horace and his wife, Eliazbeth - across three generations, as well as numerous townspeople whose lives intertwine with theirs. The result is a wide-ranging, intricate work of interconnected stories reminiscent of William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga.
Porter shows how the small-town southern culture speaks through Horace while she examines the functions of family and community in identity formation. She explains that Foote's signature style - which replaces stage directions, poetic language, and suspense-driven narratives with sparse, restrained dialogue and seemingly actionless plots - creates a simmering power by stressing subtext over text, a strategy more often associated with the novel than drama. Similarly, Foote uses recurring character types and motifs, interrelated images and symbols, and parallel and inverted events that reverberate within and among the plays, employing language and structure in innovative ways. In comparing the cycle with the works of William Faulkner and Eugene O'Neill, Porter positions Foote at the intersection of southern literature and American drama.
Foote's emphasis, Porter concludes, is not so much on returning home as on leaving it and building a new family, contending that for Foote home is not a place but a geography of the heart. Her definitive Orphans' Home shines much-needed light on an understudied talent and proves Foote's to be a vital American voice.
Table of Contents
- An orphan's dream
- Horace, son and father - the role of family in shaping identity
- Cultural influences - community, language, and identity
- Polyphonic voices - repetition and the multiplication of meaning
- Point-counterpoint - paired plays, multiple perspectives
- The presence of the past - the orphans' home cycle and the nature of time
- An orphans' home - family, place, and redemption.
by "Nielsen BookData"