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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Plays & playwrights > General
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.
Ayn Rand was an American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system known as Objectivism.In the 1930s, Rand was asked to adapt her first novel, We the Living, for the theatre. We the Living is a story of life in post-revolutionary Russia and Rand's first statement against communism. It was not a commercial success when it was published, but has gone on to sell over 3 million copies. The first substantial fiction of Rand to appear in over twenty years, this important volume contains two never-before published versions of the play - the first and last versions (the latter entitled The Unconquered). With a preface that places the work in its historical and political context, an essay on the history of the theatrical adaptation by Jeff Britting, the curator of the Ayn Rand Archives, and two alternative endings, this book is a must-have for anyone interested in Rand's philosophy.
Tennessee Williams created characters who set the stage for their own dramas. Examples include Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire, arriving at her sister's apartment with an entire trunk of costumes and props, and Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie, who directs her son on how to eat and tries to make her daughter act like a Southern Belle. This book argues for the persistence of one metatheatrical strategy running throughout Williams's entire oeuvre. It demonstrates that Williams's plays always stage the process through which they came into being and that this process consists of a variation on repetition combined with transformation. Each chapter revolves around a detailed, close reading of one play and analyzes its particular variation on repetition and transformation. Specific topics addressed include reproduction in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), mediation in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), and how the playwright frequently recycled previous works of art, including his own.
Drawing together new research from emerging and senior scholars, this selection of papers from the decennial Greek Drama V conference (Vancouver, 2017) explores the works of the ancient Greek playwrights and showcases new methodologies with which to study them. Sixteen chapters from a field of international contributors examine a range of topics, from the politics of the ancient theatre, to the role of the chorus, to the earliest history of the reception of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Employing anthropological, historical, and psychological critical methods alongside performance analysis and textual criticism, these studies bring fresh and original interpretations to the plays. Several contributions analyse fragmentary tragedies, while others incorporate ideas on the performance aspect of certain plays. The final chapters deal separately with comedy, naturally focusing on the plays of Aristophanes and Menander. Greek Drama V offers a window into where the academic field of Greek drama is now, and points towards the future scholarship it will produce.
This book focuses on an unexplored area of Edward Bond's writing. While different studies examine the violence present in his plays or his dramatic theory, questions around his powerful female characters have remained unsolved. None of the criticism has developed specifically the role of these women as speakers of their social context. The human condition that Bond depicts in his plays is not gender-oriented. From his early plays, Edward Bond has been considered misogynist, but this book presents the possibility to discover a different Bond as a writer on women with powerful voices. The reader of this book will discover in these women female spokeswomen of revolution, committed and suffering mothers but also the personification of evil and wickedness. Emotions and ideas will be analyzed in these pages in a journey through Bond's feminine universe closer to reality than to stage. Justice, the essence of humanity or the nature of oppression are dealt with through the construction of brilliant characters with no possibility of catharsis. This vision of drama as a social forum clearly exemplifies Bond's defense on the possibility of change.
Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides are often described as the greatest tragedians of the ancient world. Of these three pivotal founders of modern drama, Euripides is characterized as the interloper and the innovator: the man who put tragic verse into the mouths of slaves, women and the socially inferior in order to address vital social issues such as sex, class and gender relations. It is perhaps little wonder that his work should find such resonance in the modern day. In this concise introduction, Isabelle Torrance engages with the thematic, cultural and scholarly difficulties that surround his plays to demonstrate why Euripides remains a figure of perennial relevance. Addressing here issues of social context, performance theory, fifth-century philosophy and religion, textual criticism and reception, the author presents an astute and attractively-written guide to the Euripidean corpus - from the widely read and celebrated Medea to the lesser-known and deeply ambiguous Alcestis.
The influence of the women's movement has long been a scholarly priority in the study of British women's drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but previous scholarship has largely clustered around two events: the New Woman in the 1890s and the suffrage campaign in the years before the First World War. Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918 is the first designated study of British women's drama from a period of exceptional productivity and innovation for female playwrights. Both the British theatre and women's position within British society underwent fundamental changes in this period, and this book shows how female dramatists carefully negotiated their position in the heated debates about women's rights that occurred at this time, while staking out a place for themselves in an evolving theatrical landscape. Farkas also identifies the women's movement as a key influence on the development of female-authored drama between 1890 and 1918, but argues that scholarly prioritizing of the "radicalism" of work associated with the New Woman and the suffrage campaign has had a distorting effect in the past. Ideal for scholars of British and Victorian theatre, Women's Playwriting and the Women's Movement, 1890-1918 offers a new perspective which emphasizes the complexity of women playwrights' engagement with first-wave feminism and links it to the diversification of the British theatre in this period.
Originally published in 1987, this is a thorough and lucid introduction and commentary to the whole of Goethe's Faust. It gives the student of German and European literature valuable insights into the most important work of Germany's foremost poet. German quotations are translated or paraphrased in English and a detailed knowledge of German literature is not assumed. The book traces Goethe's work on the play over 60 years of his creative career and surveys its critical reception over the 200 years since its first appearance. Part One is analysed as a mimetic tragedy, Part Two as an historical and cultural profile of Goethe's own times. The commentary guides the reader carefully through its subtleties and multi-layered references and provides a broad and coherent structure for the overall understanding of the work. It suggests provocative interpretations of some figures and episodes in Part Two and places renewed emphasis on parts of the work that often receive relatively little attention. An appendix surveys the metres and verse forms of the play.
This book critically analyzes the body of English language translations Moliere's work for the stage, demonstrating the importance of rhyme and verse forms, the creative work of the translator, and the changing relationship with source texts in these translations and their reception. The volume questions prevailing notions about Moliere's legacy on the stage and the prevalence of comedy in his works, pointing to the high volume of English language translations for the stage of his work that have emerged since the 1950s. Adopting a computer-aided method of analysis, Ploix illustrates the role prosody plays in verse translation for the stage more broadly, highlighting the implementation of self-consciously comic rhyme and conspicuous verse forms in translations of Moliere's work by way of example. The book also addresses the question of the interplay between translation and source text in these works and the influence of the stage in overcoming formal infelicities in verse systems that may arise from the process of translation. In so doing, Ploix considers translations as texts in and of themselves in these works and the translator as a more visible, creative agent in shaping the voice of these texts independent of the source material, paving the way for similar methods of analysis to be applied to other canonical playwrights' work. The book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, adaptation studies, and theatre studies
The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare's world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies - such as ecology, tourism, and new media - and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.
Since it was written by tragedians and employed a number of formal tragic elements, satyr drama is typically categorized as a sub-genre of Greek tragedy. This categorization, however, gives an incomplete picture of the complicated relationship of the satyr play to other genres of drama in ancient Greece. For example, the humorous chorus of half-man, half-horse satyrs suggests sustained interaction between poets of comedy and satyr play. In Satyric Play, Carl Shaw notes the complex, shifting relationship between comedy and satyr drama, from sixth-century BCE proto-drama to classical productions staged at the Athenian City Dionysia and bookish Alexandrian plays of the third century BCE, and argues that comedy and satyr plays influenced each other in nearly all stages of their development. This is the first book to offer a complete, integrated analysis of Greek comedy and satyr drama, analyzing the details of the many literary, aesthetic, historical, religious, and geographical connections to satyr drama. Ancient critics and poets allude to comic-satyric associations in surprising ways, vases indicate a common connection to komos (revelry) song, and the plays themselves often share titles, plots, modes of humor, and even on occasion choruses of satyrs. Shaw's insight into this evidence reveals the relationship between satyr drama and Greek comedy to be much more intimately connected than we had known and, in fact, much closer than that between satyr drama and tragedy. Satyric Play brings new light to satyr drama as a complex, artful, inventive, and even cleverly paradoxical genre.
1) This book presents a comprehensive overview of teaching English literature in India. 2) It contains case studies of actual classroom practices. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of cultural studies and South Asian studies across UK
With its fantasy of magical travel and inexhaustible riches, Thomas Dekker's Old Fortunatus is the quintessential early modern journeying play. The adventures of Fortunatus and his sons, aided by a magical purse and wishing-hat, offers the period's most overt celebration of the pleasures of travel, as well as a sustained critique of the dangers of intemperance and prodigality. Written following a period of financial difficulty for Dekker, the play is also notable for its fascination with the symbolic, mercantile and ethical uses of gold. This Revels Plays edition is the first fully annotated, single-volume critical edition of Old Fortunatus. It offers scholarly discussion of the play's performance and textual history, including attention to the German version printed and performed in the early seventeenth century. It provides a long overdue critical reappraisal of this unjustly neglected play. -- .
Susie Salmon is just like any other young American girl. She wants to be beautiful, adores her charm bracelet and has a crush on a boy from school. There's one big difference though - Susie is dead. Add: Now she can only observe while her family manage their grief in their different ways. Susie is desperate to help them and there might be a way of reaching them... Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones is a unique coming-of-age tale that captured the hearts of readers throughout the world. Award-winning playwright Bryony Lavery has adapted it for this unforgettable play about life after loss.
Though it might seem as modern as Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov, translingual writing - texts by authors using more than one language or a language other than their primary one - has an ancient pedigree. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism aims to provide a comprehensive overview of translingual literature in a wide variety of languages throughout the world, from ancient to modern times. The volume includes sections on: translingual genres - with chapters on memoir, poetry, fiction, drama, and cinema ancient, medieval, and modern translingualism global perspectives - chapters overseeing European, African, and Asian languages. Combining chapters from lead specialists in the field, this volume will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in investigating the vibrant area of translingual literature. Attracting scholars from a variety of disciplines, this interdisciplinary and pioneering Handbook will advance current scholarship of the permutations of languages among authors throughout time.
Covering a period of nearly 40 years' work by the author this collection of essays in the Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies series brings the perspective of a Drama academic and practitioner of early English plays to the understanding of how medieval plays and Robin Hood games of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were performed. It explores why, where, when, and how the plays happened, who took part, and who were the audiences. The insights are informed by a combination of research and the public presentation of surviving texts. The research included in the volume unites the early English experiences of religious and secular performance. This recognition challenges the dominant critical distinction of the past between the two and the consequent privileging of biblical and moral plays over secular entertainments. What further binds, rather than separates, the two is that the destination of funds raised by the different activities maintained the civic and parochial needs of the institutions upon which the people depended. This collection redefines the inclusive nature and common interests of the purposes that lay behind generically different undertakings. They shared an extraordinary investment of human and financial resources in the anticipation of a profit that was pious and practical. (CS1081).
Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico Garcia Lorca's trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderon, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca's different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly's Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristobal) and the two 'human' farces The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of 'impossible' theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators' seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of 'rural drama' (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba). Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Golden Age departures in historiography and theory of history in some ways prepared the ground for modern historical methods and ideas about historical factuality. At the same time, they fed into the period's own "aesthetic-historical culture" which amalgamated fact and fiction in ways modern historians would consider counterfactual: a culture where imaginative historical prose, poetry and drama self-consciously rivalled the accounts of royal chroniclers and the dispatches of diplomatic envoys; a culture dominated by a notion of truth in which skilful construction of the argument and exemplarity took precedence over factual accuracy. Literature and Historiography in the Spanish Golden Age: The Poetics of History investigates this grey area backdrop of modern ideas about history, delving into a variety of Golden Age aesthetic-historical works which cannot be satisfactorily described as either works of literature or works of historiography but which belong in between these later strictly separate categories. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
This book is a case study into the affective history of Holocaust drama offering a new perspective on the impact of The Diary of Anne Frank, the pivotal 1950s play that was a turning point in Holocaust consciousness. Despite its overwhelming success, criticism of the Broadway makeover has been harsh, suggesting that the alleged Americanization would not do justice to the violence of the Holocaust or Anne Frank's budding Jewishness. This study revisits these issues by focusing on the play's European appropriation delving into the emotional intensity with which the play was produced and received. The core of the exploration is a history of the Dutch staging in ethnographic detail, based on unique archival material such as correspondence with Otto Frank, prompt books, original tapes, blueprints of the set and oral history. The microhistory of the first Dutch performance of the stage adaptation of Anne Frank's diary examines the staging in the context of the postwar hesitant development of publicly voiced Holocaust consciousness. Influenced by memory studies and affect theory, the emphasis is on the emotional impact of the drama on both the members of the cast and the audience and will be of great interest to students and scholars in theater and performance studies, memory studies, cultural history, Jewish studies, Holocaust studies and contemporary European history.
The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner's development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner's adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.
The Bible and Modern British Drama: 1930 to the Present Day is the first full-length study to explore how playwrights in the modern period have adapted popular biblical stories, such as Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, and the life and death of Jesus, for the stage. The book offers detailed and accessible interpretations of the work of well-known dramatists such as Christopher Fry, Howard Brenton, and Steven Berkoff, alongside the work of writers whose plays have been neglected in recent criticism, such as James Bridie and Laurence Housman. The drama is analysed within the context of changes in religious belief and practice over the course of the modern period in Britain, comparing plays that approach the Bible from a traditional religious perspective with those that offer alternative viewpoints on the text, including the voices of gay, feminist, black, Jewish, and Muslim dramatists. In doing so, the author offers a broad and in-depth exploration that is grounded in current scholarship, ranging from the past to present, across boundaries of race and gender. Ideal for students, researchers, and general readers interested in understanding how the Bible has served as an important source text for British playwrights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, The Bible and Modern British Drama shows how Bible-based drama has been influential in creating and disseminating ideas of what constitutes a "good" life, both on an individual and social level.
The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner's development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner's adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.
This book critically examines how a Hero is made, sustained, and even deformed, in contemporary cultures. It brings together diverse ideas from philosophy, mythology, religion, literature, cinema, and social media to explore how heroes are constructed across genres, mediums, and traditions. The essays in this volume present fresh perspectives for readers to conceptualize the myriad possibilities the term 'Hero' brings with itself. They examine the making and unmaking of the heroes across literary, visual and social cultures -in religious spaces and in classical texts; in folk tales and fairy tales; in literature, as seen in Heinrich Boell's Und Sagte Kein Einziges Wort, Thomas Brussig's Heroes like Us, and in movies, like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and in the short film like Dean Potter's When Dogs Fly. The volume also features nuanced takes on intersectional feminist representations in hero movies; masculinity in sports biopics; taking everyday heroes from the real to the reel, among others key themes. A stimulating work that explores the mechanisms that 'manufacture' heroes, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, film studies, media studies, literary and critical theory, arts and aesthetics, political sociology and political philosophy. |
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