Each year, new and old audiences encounter the multitudes contained within Thornton Wilder’s vast collection of work. Current research on Wilder is reflected across the numerous artistic disciplines to which he contributed as playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and translator. In this overview of recent scholarship, authors examine Wilder’s accomplishments and shortcomings in the field of translation and his legacy within the modernist movement. They breathe new life into interpretations of his lesser-read novels and strive to bring a younger generation to Grover’s Corners.
“Dessert: Thornton Wilder, The Cabala”
By John Dolis in American Modernist Fiction: Psychoanalytic Recitations of Identity (2023)
John Dolis uses Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to approach five American modernist novels by Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathanael West, and Thornton Wilder. Dolis engages with Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala, in a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and literary theory or, as the author coins it, reading as...
