Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance

(Yale University Press) In the early 20th century, many modernist writers turned to “closet dramas,” plays that are written for private reading and not for public presentation. In this book, Salvato does a close reading of the works of writers like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein who used this mode. He posits that the modernist renewal of the closet drama constituted a queer investment in the mode’s rich potential for ambiguity and deviance. Salvato is an assistant professor of theater at Cornell University.