Few individuals have positioned their work more controversially or consequently than Richard Schechner within the pivotal debates that define Performance Studies. The Rise of Performance Studies is the first collection of essays to critically examine the profound contributions that Schechner has made to Performance Studies as a discipline.

William Edmundson examines the spectacular life story of 'Colonel' John Thomas North, also known as 'The Nitrate King,' a mechanic in Leeds who became one of the best-known and richest men of his time. Forgotten in Britain and vilified in Chile and Peru, this is the first biography of a controversial but compelling figure.

A fresh biography of Mary Tudor which challenges conventional views of her as a weeping hysteric and love-struck romantic, providing instead the portrait of a queen who drew on two sources of authority to increase the power of her position: epistolary conventions and the rhetoric of chivalry that imbued the French and English courts.

A historical, theoretical, and comparative study of the emergence of the director-as-author phenomenon, posing questions of authorship and redefining the relationship between 'playwright' and the director-playwright.

A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theater whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Schanke's examination of his life and legacy allows a rare exploration into this pivotal moment of gay American history.

Speaking of Gods analyzes the figurative-narrative creation of gods, their heavenly abodes, and behaviors, reaching back to the beginning of history in Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and Greece, and continuing through the figures and narratives of a biblical tradition that includes the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an.

Exploration of the emotionologies of several medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives. The contributors analyze texts from different linguistic traditions and different periods, but they all focus on women characters.

These innovative essays take a comparative approach to queer studies while simultaneously queering the field of comparative literature, strengthening the interdisciplinary of both. The book focuses not only on comparative praxis, but also on interrogating our assumptions and categories of analysis.

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century.

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.

This book is about the emigration, film careers and socio-cultural influence of British filmmakers moving to Hollywood in the studio era. It deals with some of the unknown and neglected emigres, as well as the leading lights who founded, initiated and ensured that American film became the leading national cinema of the twentieth century.

This authoritative and comprehensive guide to key people and events in Anglo-Jewish history stretches from Cromwell's re-admittance of the Jews in 1656 to the present day and contains nearly 3000 entries, the vast majority of which are not featured in any other sources.

An account of how one Labour Party politician, after suffering the biggest setback of his political career, used the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Grosvenor Square, the battle over trade union reform and the Troubles in Northern Ireland to propel himself to No 10.

An international trade emerged between 1870-1895 that incorporated the circulation of books among countries worldwide. A history of the social network and select agents who sold and distributed books overseas, this study demonstrates agents increasingly thought of the world as a negotiable, connected system and books as transnational commodities.

This innovative collection features essays by a range of internationally renowned scholars and reconsiders textual practices in contemporary performance, specifically focusing on the exciting exchange between text, body and technology.

Honorable Mention for the 2008 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion!The roots of contemporary Islamic militancy in Southeast Asia lie in the sixteenth century, when Christian Europeans first tried to dominate Indian Ocean trade. Through a detailed analysis of sacred scriptures, epic narratives and oral histories from the region, this book shows how Southeast Asian Muslims combined cosmopolitan Islamic models of knowledge and authority with local Austronesian models of divine kingship to first resist and then to appropriate Dutch colonial models of rational bureaucracy. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, these models continue to shape regional responses to contemporary trends such as the rise of global Islamism.

The Dramaturgy of the Real brings together an incredible range of international theatre thinking, plays and performance texts, many published here for the first time, that ask questions about how we have come to understand reality and truth in the twenty-first century and analyze the presentation of non-fiction on the international stage.

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.

Romantic Cosmopolitanism shows how cosmopolitanism in the early nineteenth century offers a non-unified formulation of the nation that stands in contrast to more unified models such as Edmund Burke's which found nationality in, among other things, language, history, blood and geography.

Romantic Diasporasexamines exile in the Romantic period fromthe different perspectives of French emigres in England, British convicts transported to Australia, and Jews in their perennial diaspora.

Eglantyne Jebb was a teacher, social investigator and founder of the Save the Children Fund. Her 'Declaration of the Rights of the Child', adopted by League of Nations, shows evolution from Charity Organization Society model to philosophy of international mutual responsibility, children's rights and humanitarianism.

This engaging study examines diverse genders and sexualities in a wide range of contemporary fiction for children and young people. Mallan's insights into key dilemmas arising from the texts' treatment of romance, beauty, cyberbodies, queer, and comedy are provocative and trustworthy, and deliver exciting theoretical and social perspectives.