Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-right absolutism of the grand siecle. But their works also speak to the modern imagination, inspiring reactions from Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, adaptations and reworkings by Cesaire and ......
Labor, Poverty, and the Household in Shakespeare's London
William Muggins, an impoverished but highly literate weaver-poet, lived and wrote in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, when few of his contemporaries could even read. A Weaver Poet and the Plague’s microhistorical approach uses Muggins’s life and writing, in which he articulates a radical vision of a ......
In this engaging study, theatre scholar Robert J. Andreach argues, in what will be his final book, that the contemporary American theatre merits appreciation for dramatizing experiences in genres that jostle the audience into thinking about the experiences in new ways, based on five units of analysis: the naturalistic play, modernist theatre, ......
Propuestas para (re)construir una nacion explores how Emilia Pardo Bazan (1851-1921) imagines and engenders the Spanish nation in her theatrical production staged and/or published between 1898 and 1909. In the aftermath of Spain's colonial losses, when Spain's male authors, in a growing mood of collective introspection, directed their attention to ......
First performed in 1964, Amiri Baraka's play about a charged encounter between a black man and a white woman still has the power to shock. The play, steeped in the racial issues of its time, continues to speak to racial violence and inequality today. This volume offers strategies for guiding students through this short but challenging text. Part ......
John Field, an ordained minister in the Established Church during the sixteenth century described playhouses as 'schools of wickedness' and 'sinks of sin'. Little did he know that, after his death, his son Nathan (Nat) Field would become one of Britain's most celebrated players and playwrights. Impressed under royal warrant to become a member of ......
John Field, an ordained minister in the Established Church during the sixteenth century described playhouses as 'schools of wickedness' and 'sinks of sin'. Little did he know that, after his death, his son Nathan (Nat) Field would become one of Britain's most celebrated players and playwrights. Impressed under royal warrant to become a member of ......
The Aesthetic and Moral Art of Wole Soyinka, a scholarly monograph, is a compendium of the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka's creative works. Book One shows the dramatic, intellectual, fundamental, aesthetic and moral art. Book Two dwells upon literature, value, art, morality, aesthetics and other human interests. Book Three speaks to the ......
The award-winning playwright August Wilson used drama as a medium to write a history of twentieth-century America through the perspectives of its black citizenry. In the plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fences and The Piano Lesson, Wilson mixes African spirituality with the realism of the American theater and ......
