Who is the proper occupant of the nursery? The obvious answer is the child, and not an archive, a seductive troll-princess, or poor fosterlings. Nevertheless, characters in Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and Little Eyolf intend to host these improper occupants in their children's rooms. Dr. Gunn calls these dramas 'the empty nursery plays' because they all describe rooms intended for offspring, as well as characters' plans for refilling that space. One might expect nurseries to provide an ideal setting for a realist playwright to dramatize contemporary problems. Rather than mattering to Ibsen in terms of naturalist detail or explicit social critique, however, they are reserved for the maintenance of characters' fears and expectations concerning the future. Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants intervenes in scholarly debates in child studies by arguing that the empty bourgeois nursery is a better symbol for innocence than the child. Here, 'emptiness' refers to the common construction of the child as blank and latent. In Ibsen, the child is also doomed or deceased, and thus essentially absent, but nurseries persist as spaces of memorialization and potential alike. Nurseries also gesture toward the domains of childhood and women's labor, from birth to domestic service. 'Bourgeois nursery' points to the classed construction of innocence and to the more materialist aspects of this book, which inform our understanding of domesticity and family in the West and uncover a set of reproductive connotations broader than 'the innocent child' can convey.

In this, the third and final volume of his critical account of American drama in the twentieth century, Christopher Bigsby turns from the text-oriented drama of Williams, Miller and Albee (volume 2) in order to trace other, parallel theatrical developments of the post-war period, including contemporary groups and playwrights. Beyond Broadway denotes the geographical and spiritual challenges to prevailing standards which so fragmented the theatre of the 1960s in particular. Following his analysis of the Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway playwrights and theatres, Dr Bigsby separates the period into four main areas: performance theatre (including the Living Theatre and the Performance Group); the conjunction of dance, music and painting with drama in the ‘theatre of images’; two successful contemporary playwrights, Sam Shepard and David Mamet; and finally the committed theatre exemplified in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Chicano, black and women’s theatre.

Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction. Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed the view of death, while in the Cold War the nuclear destruction literally of everyone became a possibility. Brian Murdoch traces the heritage of Everyman in the three plays in terms of dramatic effect, changes in the image of Death, and especially the problem of living with existential guilt. Death, now over-fed, still has to be faced, but Everyman has the harder problem of living with the awareness of human wickedness without the possibility of salvation. All three plays have tended to be viewed in their specific historical contexts, but by viewing them less rigidly and as part of a long dramatic tradition, Murdoch shows that all present a message of lasting and universal significance. They pose directly to the theater audience questions not just of how to cope with death, but how to cope with life.

Aus Anlass des doppelten Geburtstages - 50 Jahre Germanistik in Hermannstadt und 60. Geburtstag von Maria Sass, der langjahrigen Leiterin dieses Lehrstuhls, - greifen die literaturhistorisch, kulturwissenschaftlich und interdisziplinar ausgerichteten Beitrage aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Geschichte und Dokumentation der rumaniendeutschen und deutschen (Gegenwarts-)Literatur auf. Fragen der Rezeptionsgeschichte und der Wechselwirkungen im Bereich der Interkulturalitat, der Literaturvermittlung und des deutsch-rumanischen Kulturaustausches bilden thematische Schwerpunkte des Studienbandes und stehen damit im Zeichen der Wahrung von Kontinuitat und Konstanz der Hermannstadter Germanistik.

Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material Culture, and Performance seeks to address the representation of the humors from non-traditional, abstract, and materialist perspectives, considering the humorality of everyday objects, activities, and performance within the early modern period. To uncover how humoralism shapes textual, material, and aesthetic encounters for contemporary subjects in a broader sense than previous studies have pursued, the project brings together three principal areas of investigation: how the humoral body was evoked and embodied within the space of the early modern stage; how the materiality of an object can be understood as constructed within humoral discourse; and how individuals' activities and pursuits can connote specific practices informed by humoralism. Across the book, contributors explore how diverse media and cultural practices are informed by humoralism. As a whole, the collection investigates alternative humoralities in order to illuminate both early modern works of art as well as the cultural moments of their production.

A pioneering collection of articles on fictionalized biographies of the Romantics in contemporary fiction and drama. It appears that the lives of the British Romantics and the myths surrounding them have a special appeal for contemporary writers.The present volume sets out to explore this renewed interest in Romantic artist-figures in the context of the current renaissance of 'life-writing'. The essays collected here deal with Romantic 'biofictions' by such authors as Peter Ackroyd, Adrian Mitchell, Ann Jellicoe, Liz Lochhead, Judith Chernaik, Amanda Prantera, Robert Nye, Tom Stoppard, Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, and others. Thomas Chatterton, William Blake, James Hogg, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, John Clare, and -- most prominently -- Lord Byron featureas the 'biographical subjects' in the works discussed.

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.

This volume brings together a selection of the major articles of David Mills (1938-2013), which along with similar volumes by Alexandra F. Johnston, Peter Meredith and Meg Twycross makes up a set of "Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies". Mills was one of these four key scholars whose work has changed what is known about English medieval drama and theatre. He made major contributions to understanding English medieval theatre in the widest sense but more specifically to the nature and development of medieval plays and their performance at Chester. The scope of his work from manuscript to performance has created new knowledge and insights brought about by his remarkable technical skill as an editor and researcher. His texts of the Chester Cycle of Mystery Plays have become the standard works. In the light of this outstanding research the volume is comprised of four sections: 1. Editors and Editing; 2. Cultural Contexts; 3. Staging and Performance; 4. Criticism and Evaluation. An editorial introduction opens the work.

In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Malcontent and The Duchess of Malfi. The plays are read as unique events occupying positions in historical process concerning the privatisation of the family (by means of symbolism and concrete household strategies such as budgeting and surveillance) and the subsequent appropriation of the family and its methods by the state. The effect is that family becomes an unofficial organ of the state. This process, however, also involves the reform of the state along lines demanded by the private family. McMahon's critical method, derived from the theory of Bourdieu, Bataille, and Girard, maps capital transactions to reveal emotionally charged, often idiosyncratic responses to issues of shared concern. Such issues include state corruption, the management of women, the performance of roles according to gender, the uses of surveillance, and the ethics of sacrifice.

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty, the comedies present the drama and the difficulty of turning away from an epistemological register in order to productively respond to the fact of our humanity. Where Shakespeare's tragedies might be viewed in Cavellian terms as the drama of skepticism, Shakespeare's comedies then exemplify the drama of acknowledgement. As a parallel and a preamble, Gottlieb suggests that the field of literary studies is itself a site of such revealing responses: where competing research methods strive to foreclose upon (or, alternatively, rejoice in) epistemological uncertainty, such commitments bespeak an urge to avoid or circumvent the human in the practice of scholarship. Reading Shakespeare's comedies in tandem with a "defactoist" view of teaching and learning points in the direction of a new humanism, one that eschews both the relativism of old deconstruction and contemporary Presentism and the determinism of various kinds of structural accounts. This book offers something new in scholarly and popular understanding of Shakespeare's work, doing so with both philosophical rigor and literary attention to the difficult work of reading.

This volume investigates the early modern understanding of twinship through new readings of plays, informed by discussions of twins appearing in such literature as anatomy tracts, midwifery manuals, monstrous birth broadsides, and chapbooks. The book contextualizes such dramatic representations of twinship, investigating contemporary discussions about twins in medical and popular literature and how such dialogues resonate with the twin characters appearing on the early modern stage. Garofalo demonstrates that, in this period, twin births were viewed as biologically aberrant and, because of this classification, authors frequently attempt to explain the phenomenon in ways which call into question the moral and constitutional standing of both the parents and the twins themselves. In line with current critical studies on pregnancy and the female body, discussions of twin births reveal a distrust of the mother and the processes surrounding twin conception; however, a corresponding suspicion of twins also emerges, which monstrous birth pamphlets exemplify. This book analyzes the representation of twins in early modern drama in light of this information, moving from tragedies through to comedies. This progression demonstrates how the dramatic potential inherent in the early modern understanding of twinship is capitalized on by playwrights, as negative ideas about twins can be seen transitioning into tragic and tragicomic depictions of twinship. However, by building toward a positive, comic representation of twins, the work additionally suggests an alternate interpretation of twinship in this period, which appreciates and celebrates twins because of their difference. The volume will be of interest to those studying Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in relation to the History of Emotions, the Body, and the Medical Humanities.

This book will constitute an original intervention into longstanding but insistently relevant debates around the significance of notions of 'performativity' to the critical analysis of early modern drama. In particular, the book aims to: show how the investigation of performativity can enable readings of Shakespeare and Jonson that challenge the dominant methodological frameworks within which those plays have come to be read; demonstrate that the thought of performativity does not come to rest in the simplicity of method or instrumentality, and that it resists its own claim that language and action might be understood as unproblematically instrumental; demonstrate that this self-resistance occurs or takes place as a moment in the process of articulating the claims of the performative, and that this process is itself in an important sense dramatic.

Theology and Existentialism in Aeschylus revivifies the complex question of fate and freedom in the tragedies of the famous Greek playwright. Starting with Sartre's insights about radical existential freedom, this book shows that Aeschylus is concerned with the ethical ramifications of surrendering our lives to fatalism (gods, curses, inherited guilt) and thoroughly interrogates the plays for their complex insights into theology and human motivation. But can we reconcile the radical freedom of existentialism and the seemingly fatal world of tragedy, where gods and curses and necessities wreak havoc on individual autonomy? If forces beyond our control or comprehension are influencing our lives, what happens to choice? How are we to conceive of ethics in a world studiously indifferent to our choices? In this book, author Ric Rader demonstrates that few understood the importance of these questions better than the tragedians, whose literature dealt with a central theological concern: What is a god? And how does god affect, impinge upon, or even enable human freedom? Perhaps more importantly: If god is dead, is everything possible, or nothing? Tragedy holds the preeminent position with regard to these questions, and Aeschylus, our earliest surviving tragedian, is the best witness to these complex theological issues.

A World Elsewhere is Steven Berkoff's bold attempt to describe his multifarious theatrical works. Berkoff outlines the methods that he uses, first of all as an actor, secondly as a playwright and thirdly as theatre director, as well as those subtle connections in between, when one discipline melds effortlessly into another. He examines the early impulses that generated his works and what drove him to give them form, as well as the challenges he faced when adapting the work of other authors. Berkoff discusses some of his most difficult, successful and unique creations, journeying through his long and varied career to examine how they were shaped by him, and how he was shaped by them. The sheer scale of this book offers a rare experience of an accomplished artist, combined with the honesty and insight of an autobiography, making this text a singular tool for teaching, inspiration and personal exploration. Suitable for anyone with an interest in Steven Berkoff and his illustrious career, A World Elsewhere is the part analysis and part confession of an artist whose work has been performed all over the world.

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.

For ordering the hardcover version of this book, please contact [email protected] (Retail Price: GBP100.00, $151.90). 'Franco Marucci's History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.' - J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author. Volume 8 continues with the 1920s and the 1930s, when the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Fascist dictatorships, and the threat of a second war challenged apolitical Modernism. Poets led by Auden, novelists like Orwell and figures such as Lawrence of Arabia defined the period. By the end of the Second World War, a realist, satirical or comic tradition resurfaces in the novel, while in poetry the affirmation of a pre-war neo-Romantic vein, especially with Dylan Thomas, is reacted against by various movements that lead poetry back to the common man. Two important years are 1953, when Waiting for Godot by Beckett is staged, and 1956, when Look Back in Anger by Osborne gives life to the 'angry' novel and theatre. Extensive discussions not only of writers now become classics (Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Heaney, Hill and Ted Hughes) but also of other leading ones (such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan) are included.

For ordering the hardcover version of this book, please contact [email protected] (Retail Price: GBP100.00, $151.90). 'Franco Marucci's History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.' - J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author. Volume 8 continues with the 1920s and the 1930s, when the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Fascist dictatorships, and the threat of a second war challenged apolitical Modernism. Poets led by Auden, novelists like Orwell and figures such as Lawrence of Arabia defined the period. By the end of the Second World War, a realist, satirical or comic tradition resurfaces in the novel, while in poetry the affirmation of a pre-war neo-Romantic vein, especially with Dylan Thomas, is reacted against by various movements that lead poetry back to the common man. Two important years are 1953, when Waiting for Godot by Beckett is staged, and 1956, when Look Back in Anger by Osborne gives life to the 'angry' novel and theatre. Extensive discussions not only of writers now become classics (Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Heaney, Hill and Ted Hughes) but also of other leading ones (such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan) are included.

The idea of the tragic has permeated Western culture for millennia, being closely bound with the concept of the limit of inescapable necessity that has been embodied in and expressed through theatre since the time of the ancient Greeks. This book addresses the question of how the twentieth century - one of the most violent periods of human history - dealt with the fundamental structure that is the tragic. Examining the consciousness of the era through an in-depth analysis of some of the twentieth century's most outstanding texts - including works by Ibsen, Claudel, O'Neill, Brecht, Camus, Beckett, Pasolini, Grotowski, Delcuvellerie and Josse De Pauw - 'Modern European Tragedy' draws a vivid picture of the development that tragedy experienced during this time.

This book presents a collection of over 200 of the most interesting and important fragments of Greek comedy, accompanied by a commentary; an extensive introduction discussing the history of comic genre; a series of appendixes on the individual poets, the inscriptional evidence, and the like; and a complete translation of the fragments. Individual sections illustrate the earliest Greek comedy from Syracuse; the characteristic features of Athenian 'Old', 'Middle', and 'New Comedy'; the comic presentation of politicians, philosophers, and women; the comic reception of other poetry; and many aspects of daily life, including dining and symposia.

'On Beckett' is a collection of writings about the Nobel Prize-winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.

Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage presents articles on the theories of translation and adaptation, new insights on the work of Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Thomas Kilroy, and Tom Murphy, historical analyses of theatrical productions during the Irish Revival, interviews with contemporary theatre directors, and a round-table discussion with the playwrights, Michael West and Thomas Kilroy. Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage challenges the notion that a country's dramatic tradition develops in cultural isolation. It uncovers connections between past productions of plays by Ibsen and Chekhov and contemporary literary adaptations of their works by Irish playwrights, demonstrating the significance of international influence for the formation of national canon. Conceived in the spirit of a round-table discussion, Ibsen and Chekhov on the Irish Stage is a collective study of the intricacies of trans-cultural migration of dramatic works and a re-examination of Irish theatre history from 1890 to the present day.

This revelatory study explores how Scottish history plays, especially since the 1930s, raise issues of ideology, national identity, historiography, mythology, gender and especially Scottish language. Covering topics up to the end of World War Two, the book addresses the work of many key figures from the last century of Scottish theatre, including Robert McLellan and his contemporaries, and also Hector MacMillan, Stewart Conn, John McGrath, Donald Campbell, Bill Bryden, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead, Jo Clifford, Peter Arnott, David Greig, Rona Munro and others often neglected or misunderstood. Setting these writers' achievements in the context of their Scottish and European predecessors, Ian Brown offers fresh insights into key aspects of Scottish theatre. As such, this represents the first study to offer an overarching view of historical representation on Scottish stages, exploring the nature of 'history' and 'myth' and relating these afresh to how dramatists use - and subvert - them. Engaging and accessible, this innovative book will attract scholars and students interested in history, ideology, mythology, theatre politics and explorations of national and gender identity.

The Nation of Islam and Black Consciousness: The Works of Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Other Writers engages in the scholarly discussions about the origins and formation of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which rarely give credit to the role of the Nation of Islam's (NOI) teachings in the emergence of the movement and in shaping the subjects and themes of its literary works. This book reevaluates the common belief that Malcolm X is the most appealing black historical figure in the movement's literature and demonstrates how the NOI's perception of black consciousness shaped the aesthetic sensibilities of the movement's poets and playwrights in their fights against anti-black racism. The Nation of Islam and Black Consciousness can be used in African American literature courses as it provides a thorough analysis of hidden literary texts written by black writers in the 1960s and 1970s. Reading this book today will help readers reflect on how a narrow understanding of "Americanness" is threatening to the American ideals of diversity and inclusiveness on which America was founded. Moreover, this book is useful for those who are interested in studying how identity politics functions to achieve certain social and cultural goals.

This series of volumes aims to provide an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of literature and religion, concerned with the fundamentally important issues of the imagination, literary perceptions and an understanding of poetics for theology and religious studies, and the underlying religious implications in so much literature and literary criticism. This introduction to the theatre also attempts to offer a meditation on the theatricality of the Incarnation. Arguing that both biblical and dramatic texts should be approached with a theatrical rather than a literary imagination, the author explores theatrical history, looking at plays as diverse as the medieval Cornish "Ordinalia" and Rostand's romantic "Cyrano de Bergerec". At the same time, he observes the comic potential of the Gospel narratives and the affirmation of humanity entailed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.