The field of performance studies analyses the production and impact of on-stage performance, such as in a theatre or circus, and off-stage performance, such as cultural rituals and political protests. Performance Studies: Key Words, Concepts and Theories introduces students to 34 key topics seen as paramount to the future of performance studies in a series of short, engaging essays by an international team of distinguished scholars. Each essay contributes to the wide-ranging, adventurous and conscientious nature that makes performance studies such an innovative, valuable and exciting field.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

The Theatre of Nation is a study of the development of the theatre movement and its relationship to political change in Ireland during the pre-revolutionary period. Ben Levitas traces the connections between Irish drama and Irish politics, and concludes that Ireland's theatre had a pivotal role to play in the controversies of its time and in the coming revolution.

This book provides a needed new interpretation of the complex cultural meanings of the late medieval, guild-produced, biblical plays of York and Chester, England, commonly known as mystery plays. It argues that the plays are themselves a "drama of masculinity," that is, dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, mercantile worlds of their performance. It further contends that the plays in their historical performance contexts produced and reinforced masculine communities defined by occupation, thus visibly naturalizing the world of work as masculine. The book offers welcome insight into a significant, canonical genre of dramatic literature that has been studied previously in devotional and civic contexts, but not yet in its role in the cultural history of masculinity.

Theatre has always been a site for selling outrage and sensation, a place where public reputations are made and destroyed in spectacular ways. This is the first book to investigate the construction and production of celebrity in the British theatre. These exciting essays explore aspects of fame, notoriety and transgression in a wide range of performers and playwrights including David Garrick, Oscar Wilde, Ellen Terry, Laurence Olivier and Sarah Kane. This pioneering volume examines the ingenious ways in which these stars have negotiated their own fame. The essays also analyze the complex relationships between discourses of celebrity and questions of gender, spectatorship and the operation of cultural markets.

Adorno and Modern Theatre explores the drama of Edward Bond, David Rudkin, Howard Barker and Sarah Kane in the context of the work of leading philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). The book engages with key principles of Adorno's aesthetic theory and cultural critique and examines their influence on a generation of seminal post-war dramatists.

The discovery on papyrus of plays by Menander, the greatest writer of Greek New Comedy, at last makes possible an evaluation on his own terms of an ancient author who, through the adaptations of Plautus and Terence, profoundly influenced the course of western drama. The present study establishes a critical perspective for understanding the kind of comedy Menander wrote, his roots, the theatrical effects he sought, and the extent of his achievement. Chapters on the major plays analyse their techniques of construction and characterisation, suggesting both the strengths and the limitations of Menander's comic tradition. This study is based on the Oxford Greek text but cites all ancient authors in translation to open the discussion to a wider audience. An introductory chapter places the tradition of New Comedy in the history of drama, and modern parallels are drawn wherever helpful. It will therefore be of value to students of drama as well as to classicists.

This classic work not only records developments in the form and style of Greek drama, it also analyses the reasons for these changes. It provides illuminating answers to questions that have confronted generations of students, such as:
* why did Aeschylus introduce the second actor?
* why did Sophocles develop character drawing?
* why are some of Euripides' plots so bad and others so good?
Greek Tragedy is neither a history nor a handbook, but a penetrating work of criticism which all students of literature will find suggestive and stimulating.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203412605

A major study of the work of one of Britain's best-known dramatists Peter Barnes was one of the UK's most significant, prolific and enduring playwrights. This book offers a major critical appraisal of the canon of Barnes' work, including a detailed study of his best-known plays, The Ruling Class, Bewitched, Laughter!, Red Noses, and Dreaming, as well as a selection of his television and radio plays which illuminate his thematic concerns, and offer key insights into his dramatic methods. Through this examination, Brian Woolland shows that many of Barnes' plays have remarkable contemporary relevance, and are formally far more innovative than has hitherto been recognised. Woolland analyses the ways in which Barnes uses and subverts theatrical traditions, and relates his work to relevant critical contexts: theatrical, critical and socio-political. Deservedly, Barnes' use of comedy is given special attention. It is a sad truth that Barnes' great talents have not always been acknowledged by the theatrical establishment. In this exciting study, Barnes finally gets the recognition he deserves, as one of the most original, daring and exuberant dramatists of his generation.

In T. S. Eliot's Ascetic Ideal, Joshua Richards charts an intellectual history of T. S. Eliot's interaction with asceticism. This history is drawn from Eliot's own education in the topic with the texts he read integrated into detailed textual analysis. Eliot's early encounters with the ascetic ideal began a lifetime of interplay and reflection upon self-denial, purgation, and self-surrender. In 1909, he began a study of mysticism, likely, in George Santayana's seminar, and thereafter showed the influence of this education. Yet, his interaction with the ascetic ideal and his background in mysticism was not a simple thing; still, his early cynicism was slowly transformed to an embrace.

In Tragedy and Irish Writing McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the three dramatists and also discerns particular sorts of tragedy within their own work. While alert to the real differences among the three, the book also traces common themes and preoccupations. It identifies a conflict between form and content, between heightened language and debased reality, as the hallmark of Irish tragedy.

New Playwriting Strategies offers a fresh and dynamic approach to playwriting that will be welcomed by teachers and aspiring playwrights alike.

T. C. W. Stinton was a highly respected classical scholar who died in 1985. He was a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, for over thirty years and devoted his life to teaching, inspiring his pupils with his own passionate love for the classics. As well as generously encouraging the work and publications of others, he also spent much time himself in researching and writing, concentrating mainly on Greek tragedy. This volume presents twenty-six of Tom Stinton's essays and reviews, mainly on Greek tragedy, covering his work from 1960 until his death in 1985. The papers include `Euripides and the Judgement of Paris', `The Scope and Limits of Allusion in Greek Tragedy', `The Apotheosis of Heracles from the Pyre', and `Greek Tragic Texts and the Limits of Conservatism'. Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, formerly Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford, has written a foreword especially for this collection.

William Saroyan, one of the most prolific writers in America, was the first playwright to win simultaneously both the New York Drama Critics' Circle award and the Pulitzer Prize in playwriting for T"he Time of Your Life" in 1940. In spite of his success, he quickly disappeared from the public eye. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote plays but did not allow them to be produced or published. Shortly before his death in 1981, his "Play Things" was produced at Vienna's English Theatre.

This volume concentrates in one source the tremendous amount of information available about Saroyan's life and work in the theatre. A chronology provides a capsule summary of the chief events in his career, and a critical overview assesses his place in American theatre. Entries for his plays include plot synopses, production information, and critical commentary. Annotated primary and secondary bibliographies list his published works, production reviews, and other writings about his theatrical career. The volume also includes archival sources to foster additional research about Saroyan.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) are major plays by Tennessee Williams, one of America's most significant dramatists. They both received landmark productions and are widely-studied and performed around the world. The plays have also inspired popular screen adaptations and have generated a body of important and lasting scholarship.
In this indispensable Reader's Guide, Thomas P. Adler:
- charts the development of the criticism surrounding both works, from the mid-twentieth century through to the present day
- provides a readable assessment of the key debates and issues
- examines a range of theoretical approaches from biographical and New Criticism to feminist and queer theory.
In so doing, Adler helps us to appreciate why these plays continue to fascinate readers, theatregoers and directors alike.

Departing from earlier studies which regarded incest as a literary topos or dramatic metaphor foregrounding political, social, or legal issues, Words and Deeds: The Spectacle of Incest in English Renaissance Tragedy argues that the presence of incest on the Renaissance stage is a strategy for the enactment of the spectator's tragic experience. Incest is explored neither as a sin nor as a crime, but as an "unspeakable" experience filtered through dramatic words and deeds. The incitement of desire, visual pleasure, and unconscious fantasy, as well as traumatic rejection, pain, and horror, are all aspects of this paradoxical and uncanny experience. Aristotelian theory of tragedy, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Michel Foucault's notions of the deployment of sexuality and alliance, concur in the analysis of plays where incest is a central or a secondary motif - Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi - and others where incest is an effect of language and mise-en-scene - Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, Shakespeare's King Lear. The variety of topics and the combination of critical perspectives makes In Words and Deeds an attractive book for students and teachers of Renaissance drama, as well as for those with a special interest in psychoanalytic and other new theoretical approaches to the literary text.

For anyone interested in drama, " Playwrights on Playwriting: From Ibsen to Ionesco " offers revealing and astute insights on modern theater and the creation of plays. The book gathers the opinions and theories of the greatest names in the past 200 years of drama, among them Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugene O'Neill, Bertolt Brecht, Tenessee Williams, Sean O'Casey, and Arthur Miller, to name a few. In the first part of the book, "Credos and Concepts," the playwrights offer their differing philosophies on the dynamics of theatrical performance and the changes in drama since Aristotle. In the second part, "Creations," the same dramatists look at specific plays of their own, commenting on their intended goals and the works' overall success. A unique and enlightening collection, Playwrights on Playwriting is an essential resource for the enthusiast of theater.

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.

Essential for students of Theatre Studies, this series of six decadal volumes provides a critical survey and reassessment of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1950s to the present. Each volume equips readers with an understanding of the context from which work emerged, a detailed overview of the range of theatrical activity and a close study of the work of four of the major playwrights by a team of leading scholars. Chris Megson's comprehensive survey of the theatre of the 1970s examines the work of four playwrights who came to promience in the decade and whose work remains undiminished today: Caryl Churchill (by Paola Botham), David Hare (Chris Megson), Howard Brenton (Richard Boon) and David Edgar (Janelle Reinelt). It analyses their work then, its legacy today and provides a fresh assessment of their contribution to British theatre. Interviews with the playwrights, with directors and with actors provides an invaluable collection of documents offering new perspectives on the work. Revisiting the decade from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Chris Megson provides an authoritative and stimulating reassessment of British playwriting in the 1970s.

Gene A. Plunka argues that drama is the ideal art form to revitalize the collective memory of Holocaust resistance. Drama of and about the Holocaust can be staged worldwide, thereby introducing the Shoah to diverse audiences. Moreover, theatre affects audiences emotionally, subliminally, or intellectually (sometimes simultaneously) in a direct way that many other art forms cannot match. This comparative drama study examines a variety of international plays - some quite well-known, others more obscure - that focus on collective or individual defiance of the Nazis.

Behrman's prolific career as a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter spans a period from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. As a writer for popular performance, he had to contend with commercial influences and with producers and directors involved in the dynamics of the collaborative process. Though eminently successful, his works have not received adequate critical scrutiny. His ouevre probably will never be fully determined because of collaboration, numerous rewrites, and the many unpublished and unproduced plays and scripts. Author Robert F. Gross here provides an immensely detailed record of the primary materials, published and unpublished, including plays, filmscripts, fiction, and essays, and of the critical response, both reviews and analytical studies. Focusing on Behrman as a dramatist, Gross has written extensive plot summaries and critical overviews for each of fifty-one plays. Where applicable, full production credits are given for premieres and revivals, and references are made to reviews and commentary about specific productions as well as to the plays in general. The annotated secondary bibliography is divided into chronologically organized sections for reviews and for books, parts of books, and articles. Fully cross-referenced, the material is also accessible through an author index to the secondary bibliography and a general subject index. In an opening appraisal, Gross expresses his appreciation for Behrman, whose high comedies he finds to be informed by a probing ethical conscience and whose goal of scrupulosity he emulates in his own work. This scrupulous playwright is here given his due in a comprehensive sourcebook of value for theatre historians and theatre professionals.

God and the Gothic: Romance and Reality in the English Literary Tradition provides a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the monasteries, now seen as usurping authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part one interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe's melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part two traces the origins of the doppelganger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In part three, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in part four nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restore the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

Drawing on entirely new evidence, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts in England 1580-1630 examines the history of English dramatic form and its relationship to the mathematics, technology, and early scientific thought during the Renaissance period. The book demonstrates how practical modes of thinking that were typical of the sixteenth century resulted in new genres of plays and a new vocabulary for problems of poetic representation. In the epistemological moment the book recovers, we find new ideas about form and language that would become central to Renaissance literary discourse; in this same moment, too, we find new ways of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice that are typical of modernity, new attitudes towards spatial representation, and a new interest in both poetics and mathematics as distinctive ways of producing knowledge about the world. By emphasizing the importance of theatrical performance, the book engages with continuing debates over the cultural function of the early modern stage and with scholarship on the status of modern authorship. When we consider playwrights in relation to the theatre rather than the printed book, they appear less as "authors" than as figures whose social position and epistemological presuppositions were very similar to the craftsmen, surveyors, and engineers who began to flourish during the sixteenth century and whose mathematical knowledge made them increasingly sought after by men of wealth and power.

This is a fresh reassessment of the work of the principal playwrights associated with the Irish Dramatic Revival, a movement that was to radically redefine Irish theatre and see the birth of the world's first national theatre, the Abbey, in 1904. The work of O'Casey and Synge has had a profound influence on generations of writers and remains key to the study of modern drama, whereas work by Yeats and Lady Gregory has received renewed attention among theatre makers and scholars owing to their radical innovation and range.From a consideration of the twin strands of Irish drama prior to the revival, Anthony Roche considers the work of Synge and his experimentation in the creation of a new national drama that drew on native sources while developing a modern and prophetic form of theatre. He explores the role of Yeats as founder and playwright; the role of women and in particular Lady Gregory as producer and dramatist; and the playwrights who emerged following independence. O'Casey's ground-breaking Dublin plays receive detailed consideration, and the new Irish modernism that followed in the 30s and which also witnessed the founding of the Gate Theatre in Dublin.The Companion also features a number of essays from other leading scholars and contemporary practioners offering a variety of critical perspectives on this period of radical change and development in modern Irish theatre.