This book explores how citizenship is differently gendered and performed across national and regional boundaries. Using 'citizenship' as its organizing concept, it is a collection of multidisciplinary approaches to legal, socio-cultural and performative aspects of gender construction and identity: violence against women, victimhood and agency, and everyday issues of socialization in a globalized world. It brings together scholars of politics, media, and performance who are committed to dialogue across both nation and discipline. This study is the culmination of a two-year project on the topic of 'Gendered Citizenship', arising from an international collaboration that has sought to develop a comparative and yet singular perspective on performance in relation to key political themes facing our countries of origin in the early decades of this century. The research is interdisciplinary and multinational, drawing on Indian, European, and North and South American contexts.

The original Blackfriars closed its doors in the 1640s, ending over half-a-century of performances by men and boys. In 2001, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, it opened once again. The reconstructed Blackfriars, home to the American Shakespeare Center, represents an old playhouse for the new millennium and therefore symbolically registers the permanent revolution in the performance of Shakespeare. Time and again, the industry refreshes its practices by rediscovering its own history. This book assesses how one American company has capitalised on history and in so doing has forged one of its own to become a major influence in contemporary Shakespearean theatre.

In 1936, Samuel Beckett wrote a letter to the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein expressing a desire to work in the lost tradition of silent film. The production of Beckett's Film in 1964, on the cusp of his work as a director for stage and screen, coincides with a widespread revival of silent film in the period of cinema's modernist second wave. Drawing on recently published letters, archival material and production notebooks, Samuel Beckett and Cinema is the first book to examine comprehensively the full extent of Beckett's engagement with cinema and its influence on his work for stage and screen. The book situates Beckett within the context of first and second wave modernist filmmaking, including the work of figures such as Vertov, Keaton, Lang, Epstein, Flaherty, Dreyer, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Duras, Rogosin and Hitchcock. By examining the parallels between Beckett's methods, as a writer-director, and particular techniques, such as the embodied presence of the camera, the use of asynchronous sound, and the cross-pollination of theatricality and cinema, as well as the connections between his collaborators and the nouvelle vague, the book reveals how Beckett's aesthetic is fundamentally altered by his work for the screen, and his formative encounters with modernist film culture.

Classical Greek Tragedy offers a comprehensive survey of the development of classical Greek tragedy combined with close readings of exemplary texts. Reconstructing how audiences in fifth-century BCE Athens created meaning from the performance of tragedy at the dramatic festivals sponsored by the city-state and its wealthiest citizens, it considers the context of Athenian political and legal structures, gender ideology, religious beliefs, and other social forces that contributed to spectators' reception of the drama. In doing so it focuses on the relationship between performers and watchers, not only Athenian male citizens, but also women and audiences throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. This book traces the historical development of these dynamics through three representative tragedies that span a 50 year period: Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus, and Euripides' Helen. Topics include the role of the chorus; the tragic hero; recurring mythical characters and subject matter; Aristotelian assessments of the components of tragedy; developments in the architecture of the theater and their impact on the interactions of characters, and the spaces they occupy. Unifying these discussions is the observation that the genre articulates a reality beyond the visible stage action that intersects with the characters' existence in the present moment and resonates with the audience's religious beliefs and collective psychology. Human voices within the performance space articulate powerful forces from an invisible dimension that are activated by oaths, hymns, curses and prayers, and respond in the form of oracles and prophecies, forms of discourse which were profoundly meaningful to those who watched the original productions of tragedy.

In The Cinema of Catherine Breillat, Belot offers a detailed analysis of Breillat's past and recent films. Breillat is one of the most internationally renowned French women filmmakers whose notoriety is built on her explicit representation of women's sexuality. Most of her films rely on a female protagonist's personal and intimate search of her self, characterised by her sexual journey. Facing censorship and controversy, Breillat's films do not easily fit classification and place the viewer into an uncomfortable position. This study looks at Breillat as an independent cinema auteur entertaining a close relation with her films by exploring and positing women, from adolescence to adulthood, as sexual beings reflecting her films' identity emanating from Breillat's personal or intimate scenes.

The aim of this essay is to analyse TV series from the point of view of philosophical aesthetics. Aiming to show how philosophy may contribute to "seriality studies", Andrzejewski and Salwa focus on seriality as a factor which defines the structure of TV series, their aesthetic properties, as well as their modes of reception. TV series have been studied within media theory and cultural studies for quite a long time, but they have been approached mainly in terms of their production, distribution, and consumption across various and changing social contexts. Following the agenda of philosophical aesthetics Andrzejewski and Salwa claim instead seriality implies a sort of normativity, i.e. that it is possible to indicate what features a television show has to have in order to be a serial show as well as the manner in which it should be watched if it is to be experienced as a serial work.

This edited collection provides an in-depth and wide-ranging exploration of pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman's distinctive project of "somaesthetics," devoted not only to better understanding bodily experience but also to greater mastery of somatic perception, performance, and presentation. Against contemporary trends that focus narrowly on conceptual and computational thinking, Shusterman returns philosophy to what is most fundamental-the sentient, expressive, human body with its creations of living beauty. Twelve scholars here provide penetrating critical analyses of Shusterman on ontology, perception, language, literature, culture, politics, aesthetics, cuisine, music, and the visual arts, including films of his work in performance art.