Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was one of the French philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment. This volume contains the first English translations of his plays, The Illegitimate Son and The Father of the Family. These complex and very entertaining plays delve into the attitudes of the middle-class, bourgeois society and reveal an eighteenth-century "suburbia" that populates dramatic and suspenseful situations and settings. The translations are vivid and contemporary and bring the plays alive to early twenty-first-century stage and culture.

Text & Presentation is an annual anthology of essays devoted to all aspects of theatre and performance scholarship. This new volume represents a selection of the best research presented at the 35th international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles. The essays include innovative detective work on Aristophanes's and Aeschylus's plays and discussions of topics including Joe Orton's plays as social protest against the power of psychiatry and the asylum, George Eliot's controversial description of the burlesque spirit as ""fodder for degraded appetites,"" and psychological depictions of young women entering into sexual experience in Liz Lochhead's Dracula, among others.

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. This new volume represents a selection of the best research presented at the 34th international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference held in Los Angeles in 2010. Topics covered include metatheatrical experiments and adaptations of Greek tragedy, early Soviet orientalist plays, the working class on the 1920s Broadway stage, Tennessee Williams's grandfather as character model, psychotherapy on stage, and African-American musicals, among other topics. Reviews of eight selected books are also included.

Deals with the various aspects of theatre scholarship. This title presents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference. It includes papers from the 33rd annual conference held in Los Angeles, California.

When a nation wants to reconnect with a sense of national identity, its cultural celebrations, including its theatre, are often tinged with nostalgia for a cultural high point in its history. Leaders often try to create a ?neo-classical? cultural identity. Artificially returning to an imagined pinnacle, however, can fail to take into account new aspects of national identity, such as the infusion of other cultures and languages. This collection of essays discusses the relationship between political power and the construction or subversion of cultural identity. The collection takes a wide historical perspective from distinct periods and cultures from all over the world. A few of the topics examined include how theatre in 18th century Poland tried to reconstitute the identity of an imagined classical heritage clung to by Polish nobles; how festival practices during the French Revolution tried to give meaning to recent events and rein in anxiety about split loyalties; how Athenian prologues cemented early American culture; how romantic admiration of peasant culture spread from Germany throughout Europe; how Greek tragedy in postwar Japan reflects the conflict of Japan's imposed identity as a Western-style democracy with its prewar identity as a samurai nation; and how Mexican archeological performance links the indigenous past with a post-revolutionary identity as a mixed race country.