Lifting the Veil
Revision and Double-Consciousness in Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3455919 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Danny Sexton (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 777-787 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Callaloo (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/cal.0.0178 |
| OpenAlex | W2020069150 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
Criticism of Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth has often centered on its being a retelling 1 of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and many critics have read it against Sophocles' play. Although this type of reading has contributed significantly to how we read and engage Dove's play, what I propose is that we read Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth against itself. 2 The play was first published in 1994 by Story Line Press, and a completely revised second edition appeared in 1996. In a 2000 interview with Robert McDowell, the publisher of Story Line Press, Dove stated that she first conceived the idea for the play in 1979 while in Jerusalem with her husband. She completed a first draft of the play in less than a month and then sent copies to New York agents, knowing that it was everything a play couldn't be to succeed in the commercial theater world: a historical drama, an adaptation of a Classic with too many non-mainstream characters (qtd. in Ingersoll177). Dove's instincts about the play seemed to be validated when the copies came back with no-thank-you notes at- tached. As she told McDowell, she put the copies and notes away and continued her life in poetry. Yet the play remained and, through her husband's periodical questions about the manuscript, Dove revised the play. Once, she put the play into prose, but in 1989 put it back into verse so that at least when (she) was dead and gone, the version scholars would find among (her) papers would be the one (she) wanted them to see (McDowell
Aesthetics · Art · Astronomy · Consciousness · Dove · Epistemology · Linguistics · Physics · Political science · Visual arts · Cuban History and Society · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism
| Citations per year | 0.33 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2021 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |