• »Bangor Home
• »School of English

Steven Price, MA, PhD

Enjoys teaching

Screenwriting, film, drama, English and American literature. I am particularly interested in working with postgraduates who wish to examine the intersection of literature and non-traditional texts and media (e.g. screenplays, the impact of technological change on textual production).

Research Profile

Until recently my principal field of research interest has been in contemporary British and American drama.  Increasingly, the most prominent figures in this area have moved into other fields, often simultaneously, and I have begun to examine the relationships between the dramatic writings and work in other fields.  For example, I have looked at Harold Pinter’s drama in the context not only of his political writings but of current debates in jurisprudence; David Mamet’s work in theatre now needs to be considered as merely one strand of a career in which his achievements in screenwriting and in film direction arguably have equal status.

Partly as a result, I have become especially interested in the peculiar status of the screenplay text.  This has never been regarded as ‘literature’, despite the prolific production of screenplays by major writers, the significant expansion in screenplay publication in recent decades, the development of screenwriting into a mainstream discipline in universities in the UK and the US, and the quite different status of the theatrical play text.  Accordingly I am currently working on two substantial projects.  The first is a history of the screenplay; the second is an analysis of its textual properties, and the critical and ideological bases for its continuing marginalisation as an object of academic study. 

Major Publications

The Screenplay: Authorship, Ideology, and Criticism (Palgrave), submission date February 2009

The Plays, Screenplays and Films of David Mamet (Palgrave, August 2008).

‘Fifteen-Love, Thirty-Love: Edward Albee’, A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama, ed. David Krasner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 247-62.

 ‘On Directing Mamet’, The Cambridge Companion to David Mamet, ed.Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),  pp. 154-70.

‘Harold Pinter Before the Law’, The Art of Crime: The Plays and Films of Harold Pinter and David Mamet, ed. Leslie Kane (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 55-69.

‘Disguise in Love: Gender and Genre in House of Games and Speed-the-Plow’, Gender and Genre: Essays on David Mamet, ed.Christopher C. Hudgins and Leslie Kane (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 41-59.

ed., ‘American Literature, The Twentieth Century’, The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999-2007).

with W. Tydeman, Oscar Wilde: ‘Salome’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

‘Negative Creation: The Detective Story in Glengarry Glen Ross’, David Mamet’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’: Text and Performance, ed. L. Kane (New York: Garland, 1996), pp.3-17.

Current Support for Others' Research

editor, The David Mamet Review (2005-)

founder member of the David Mamet society (1994-)