This volume responds to a renewed focus on tragedy in theatre and literary studies to explore conceptions of tragedy in the dramatic work of seventeen canonical American playwrights. For students of American literature and theatre studies, the assembled essays offer a clear framework for exploring the work of many of the most studied and performed playwrights of the modern era. Following a contextual introduction that offers a survey of conceptions of tragedy, scholars examine the dramatic work of major playwrights in chronological succession, beginning with Eugene O'Neill and ending with Suzan-Lori Parks. A final chapter provides a study of American drama since 1990 and its ongoing engagement with concepts of tragedy. The chapters explore whether there is a distinctively American vision of tragedy developed in the major works of canonical American dramatists and how this may be seen to evolve over the course of the twentieth century through to the present day. Among the playwrights whose work is examined are: Susan Glaspell, Langston Hughes, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Marsha Norman and Tony Kushner. With each chapter being short enough to be assigned for weekly classes in survey courses, the volume will help to facilitate critical engagement with the dramatic work and offer readers the tools to further their independent study of this enduring theme of dramatic literature.

Patrice Chereau (1944 - 2013) was one of France's leading directors in the theatre and on film and a major influence on Shakespearean performance. He is internationally known for memorable productions of both drama and opera. His life-long companionship with Shakespeare began in 1970 when his innovative Richard II made the young director famous overnight and caused his translator to denounce him publicly as an iconoclast, for a production mixing "music-hall, circus, and pankration". After this break, Chereau read Shakespeare's texts assiduously, "line by line and word by word", with another renowned poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Drawing on new interviews with many of Chereau's collaborators, this study explores a unique theatre maker's interpretations of Shakespeare in relation to the European tradition and to his wider body of work on stage and film, to establish his profound influence on other producers of Shakespeare.

Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare's plays.

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.

Samuel Beckett's private writings and public work show his deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Samuel Beckett and Psychology is an innovative study of the author's engagement with key concepts in early experimental psychology and rapidly developing scientific ideas about perception, attention and mental imagery. Through innovative new readings of Beckett's later dramatic and prose works, the book reveals the links between his aesthetic method and the methodologies of experimental psychology through the 20th century. Covering important later works including Happy Days, Not I and Footfalls, Samuel Beckett and Psychology sheds important new light on Beckett's depictions of the workings of the embodied mind.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDES TO EXAM SUCCESS from York Notes - the UK's favourite English Literature Study Guides. York Notes for AS & A2 are specifically designed for AS & A2 students to help you get the very best grade you can. They are comprehensive, easy to use, packed with valuable features and written by experienced experts to give you an in-depth understanding of the text, critical approaches and the all-important exam. An enhanced exam skills section which includes essay plans, expert guidance on understanding questions and sample answers. You'll know exactly what you need to do and say to get the best grades. A wealth of useful content like key quotations, revision tasks and vital study tips that'll help you revise, remember and recall all the most important information. The widest coverage and the best, most in-depth analysis of characters, themes, language, form, context and style to help you demonstrate an exhaustive understanding of all aspects of the text. York Notes for AS & A2 are available for these popular titles: The Bloody Chamber (9781447913153) Doctor Faustus (9781447913177) Frankenstein (9781447913214) The Great Gatsby (9781447913207) The Kite Runner (9781447913160) Macbeth (9781447913146) Othello (9781447913191) Wuthering Heights (9781447913184) Jane Eyre (9781447948834) Hamlet (9781447948872) A Midsummer Night's Dream (9781447948841) Northanger Abbey (9781447948858 Pride & Prejudice (9781447948865) Twelfth Night (9781447948889)

Shakespeare's plays have long been open to reimagining and reinterpretation, from John Fletcher's riposte to The Taming of the Shrew in 1611 to present day spin-offs in a whole range of media, including YouTube videos and Manga comics. This book offers a clear route map through the world of adaptation, selecting examples from film, drama, prose fiction, ballet, the visual arts and poetry, and exploring their respective political and cultural interactions with Shakespeare's plays. 36 specific case studies are discussed, three for each of the 12 plays covered, offering additional guidance for readers new to this important area of Shakespeare studies. The introduction signals key adaptation issues that are subsequently explored through the chapters on individual plays, including Shakespeare's own adaptive art and its Renaissance context, production and performance as adaptation, and generic expectation and transmedial practice. Organized chronologically, the chapters cover the most commonly studied plays, allowing readers to dip in to read about specific plays or trace how technological developments have fundamentally changed ways in which Shakespeare is experienced. With examples encompassing British, North American, South and East Asian, European and Middle Eastern adaptations of Shakespeare's plays, the volume offers readers a wealth of insights drawn from different ages, territories and media.

In a series of interviews with fifty playwrights from the US and UK, this book offers a fascinating study of the voices, thoughts, and opinions of today's most important dramatists. Filled with probing questions, Fifty Playwrights on their Craft explores ideas such as how does playwriting help a global dialogue; where do dramatists find the ideas that become the stories and narratives within their plays; how can the stage inform the writer's creative process; how does crossing boundaries between art forms push the living art form of theatre-making forward; and will there be playwrights in another 50 years? Through these interrogating interviews we come to understand how and why playwrights write what they do and gain insight into their processes and motivations. Together, the interviews provide an inter-generational dialogue between dramatists whose work spans over six decades. Featuring interviews with playwrights such as Edward Bond, Katori Hall, Chris Goode, David Greig, Willy Russell, David Henry Hwang, Alecky Blythe, Anne Washburn and Simon Stephens, Jester and Svich offer an unprecedented view into the multiple perspectives and approaches of key playwrights on both sides of the Atlantic.

The mid-eighteenth century witnessed a particularly intense conflict between the Enlightenment philosophes and their enemies, when intellectual and political confrontation became inseparable from a battle for public opinion. Logan J. Connors underscores the essential role that theatre played in these disputes. This is a fascinating and detailed study of the dramatic arm of France's war of ideas in which the author examines how playwrights sought to win public support by controlling every aspect of theatrical production - from advertisements, to performances, to criticism. An expanding theatre-going public was recognised as both a force of influence and a force worth influencing. By analysing the most indicative examples of France's polemical theatre of the period, Les Philosophes by Charles Palissot (1760) and Voltaire's Le Cafe ou L'Ecossaise (1760), Connors explores the emergence of spectators as active agents in French society, and shows how theatre achieved an unrivalled status as a cultural weapon on the eve of the French Revolution. Adopting a holistic approach, Connors provides an original view of how theatre productions 'worked' under the ancien regime, and discusses how a specific polemical atmosphere in the eighteenth century gave rise to modern notions of reception and spectatorship.

Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot's thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experimentation. While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form. While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining communities of Lawrence's plays, the sexually unconventional and non-binary gender expressions of Joyce's fiction, and the female experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of theatrical performance. These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts, but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures in literary history.

Hercules is the best-known character from classical mythology. Seneca's play Hercules Furens presents the hero at a moment of triumph turned to tragedy. Hercules returns from his final labor, his journey to the Underworld, and then slaughters his family in an episode of madness. This play exerted great influence on Shakespeare and other Renaissance tragedians, and also inspired contemporary adaptations in film, TV, and comics. Aimed at undergraduates and non-specialists, this companion introduces the play's action, historical context and literary tradition, critical reception, adaptation, and performance tradition.

Through an examination of a range of performance works ranging from Jean Cocteau's ballet The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (1921) to Julie Taymor's monumental production of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark (2010) and Mexican playwright Isaac Gomez's La Ruta(2018), Staging Technology asks what becomes visible when we encounter plays, operas, and musicals that are themselves about fraught human/machine interfaces. What can theatrical production tell us about the way technology functions as an element of ideology and power in narrative drama? About the limits of the human? Staging Technology bridges the divide between the technical practices of theatre production and critical, theoretical approaches to interpreting drama to examine the way dramatic theatre's technologies are shaped by larger historical, ideological, and economic forces. At the same time, it examines how those technologies themselves have influenced 20th and 21st-century playwrights', composers', and librettists' choice of subject matter for staged representation. Examining performance works from the modernist and post-modern European and American canon of drama, opera, and performance art including works by Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Muller, Sophie Treadwell, Harold Pinter, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Arthur Miller, Robert Pinsky, John Adams and Alice Goodman, Staging Technology transforms how we think about the interrelationship between theatre practice, performance, narrative drama, and text. In it Craig N. Owens synthesizes approaches to interpretation and practice from disparate realms, offering insights into over-arching ways of making meaning that are illustrated through focused and innovative readings of individual works for the dramatic stage. Staging Technology provides a new and transformative paradigm for thinking about dramatic literature, the practices of representational theatre production, and the historical and social contexts they inhabit.

Over the last 20 years, the concept of 'economic' activity has come to seem inseparable from psychological, semiotic and ideological experiences. In fact, the notion of the 'economy' as a discrete area of life seems increasingly implausible. This returns us to the situation of Shakespeare's England, where the financial had yet to be differentiated from other forms of representation. This book shows how concepts and concerns that were until recently considered purely economic affected the entire range of sixteenth and seventeenth century life. Using the work of such critics as Jean-Christophe Agnew, Douglas Bruster, Hugh Grady and many others, Shakespeare and Economic Theory traces economic literary criticism to its cultural and historical roots, and discusses its main practitioners. Providing new readings of Timon of Athens, King Lear, The Winter's Tale, The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Tempest, David Hawkes shows how it can reveal previously unappreciated qualities of Shakespeare's work.

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