Theatre studies Books

In studying performances of marriage in modern and contemporary British and American drama, Clum highlights the fact that - paradoxically - at a time when theatre was both popular entertainment and high culture, many of the most commercially and...

This book examines queer performance in Britain since the early 1990s, arguing for the significance of emerging collaborative modes of practice. Using queer theory and the history of early lesbian and gay theatre to examine claims to representation among...

Over the course of the eighteenth century notions of what it meant to be a woman changed radically. Through examining the work of actresses including Anne Oldfield, Peg Woffington, Dora Jordan, and Sarah Siddons, Helen Brooks reveals how female...

This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover...

Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics explores the intersections between contemporary European theatre and performance, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, and current preoccupations with the politics of memory in Europe...

Children's texts are highly responsive to social change and to global politics, and are implicated in shaping the values of children and young people. New World Orders, now in paperback for the first time, shows how texts for children and young people...

This book focuses on the relationship between European integration, its outputs and national institutional and political settings. It explores the political mechanisms through which the EU plays a role in domestic social policy changes.

How do theatre and performance transmit and dispute ideologies of neoliberalism? The essays in this anthology examine the mechanisms and rhetorics of contemporary multinational and transnational organizations, artists, and communities that produce...

A collection of essays on the ways the senses 'speak' on Shakespeare's stage. Drawing on historical phenomenology, science studies, gender studies and natural philosophy, the essays provide critical tools for understanding Shakespeare's investment in...

At an unparalleled time of the construction of reality across the fields of the science and humanities on a variety of platforms, theatre and performance participates in the current obsession with the problems and possibilities of the epistemologies of...

This book explores the significance of the physicality of manuscripts and printed early modern texts. Focusing on the material aspects and social practices of texts as a new way of reading meaning, it reassesses the developing relationships between...

This book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of 'body armour' to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular...

Now available in paperback for the first time, this book brings together leading scholars in the field to analyze Shakespeare's plays, showing how their dramatic content shapes issues debated in conflicts arising from the creation and application of law...

Irish culture is obsessed with the past, and this book asks why and how. In an innovative reading of Irish culture since 1980, Emilie Pine provides a new analysis of theatre, film, television, memoir and art, and interrogates the anti-nostalgia that...

This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre,' metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to...

What does it mean to say Indian movies are melodramatic? How do film audiences engage with socio-political issues? What role has cinema played in the emergence of new economic forms, consumer cultures, and digital technologies in a globalizing India? The...

Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent argues that women managed their own wealth to a far greater extent than previously recognized. Women bought, sold, sued, lent money, and contracted debts with little legal or financial oversight of...

Using examples of refugee arts and theatrical activity since the 1990s, this book examines how the 'refugee crisis' has conditioned all arts and cultural activity with refugees in a world where globalization and migration go hand in hand.

Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement.This bookanalyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema,reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion...

This book, now available in paperback, unravels politics from theatre in order to propose a new means to politicize performance. Performance analyses ranging from child actors, animals and objects to reflections on the theatre work of Societas Raffaello...

The automaton, known today as the robot, can be seen as a metaphor for the historical period in which it is explored. Chapters include examinations of Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass nature, the Cartesian mind/body divide, automata as objects of...

A critical survey of Hollywood film musicals from the 1960s to the present. This book examines how, in the post-studio system era, cultural, industrial and stylistic circumstances transformed this once happy-go-lucky genre into one both fluid and cynical...

This exploration of the territory between theory and practice in contemporary theatre features essays by academics from theatre and translation studies, and delineates a new space for the discussion of translation in the theatre that is international,...

A far-reaching examination of exoticism, cultural internationalism and modernism's encounters with Indonesian tradition, Performing Otherness examines how Indonesia entered world stages through imperialism as an antimodern phantasm and through...

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces...

Although the sciences have long understood the value of practice-based research, the arts and humanities have tended to structure a gap between practice and analysis. This book examines differences and similarities between Performance as Research...

Drawing on original archival research, Racial Geometries... examines popular forms of performance -- from musical theatre and minstrelsy to non-theatrical forms like Chinatown tourism -- to expose how American racial formation between the two world wars...

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; A.Forsyth &  C.Megson The Promise of Documentary;  J.Reinelt Mediating the 1930s: Documentary and Politics in Theatre Union's Last Edition (1940); B.Harker History in the Driving...

PART I: ESSAYS The Dramaturgy of the Real; C.Martin Towards a Poetics of Theatre and Public Events; J.Reinelt Staging Terror; W.Hesford Post-1990s Verbatim Theatre in South Africa: Exploring an African Concept of Truth; Y.Hutchison Reality from the...

This new edition of Anthony Roche's pioneering survey of twentieth-century Irish drama brings the story up to date with new material on the contemporary Irish theatre scene.

One of the most neglected areas of study in nineteenth-century theater is pantomime: this book provides a comprehensive overview of pantomime in the Victorian period, ranging from the ideological positions perpetrated by pantomime to discussions of...

Examining some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history, including Titus Andronicus, The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling, this book reveals the pernicious erasure of rape and violence against women in the early modern era, and the politics...

Hijikata Tatsumi's explosive 1959 debut Forbidden Colors sparked a new genre of performance in Japan - butoh: an art form of contrasts, by turns shocking and serene. Since then, though interest has grown exponentially, and people all over the world are...

There is a complex relationship between performance, youth, and the shifting material circumstances under which theatre for children and youth-birth through twenties-is generated and perceived. Offering multiple, intersecting narratives, this book...

In this unique study, Michael Y. Bennett re-reads four influential modern plays alongside their contemporary debates between rationalism and empiricism to show how these monumental achievements were thoroughly a product of their time, but also universal...

Engaging Audiences provides an insightful introduction to spectatorship from the perspective of cognitive studies. Using performances of several plays and a wide array of scientific evidence, Bruce McConachie examines the dynamics of conscious attention,...

Provides a comparative approach to the internationally wide-spread phenomenon of the contemporary director-auteur in the theatre, urging a historical and theoretical exploration of the visions, methods, and stage idioms in the work of established artists...

Between 1780 and 1830, the growing London population divided into immigrant neighborhoods with two dozen unlicensed theatres tailoring productions to attract and serve this new audience. Playing to the Crowd is the first study of the productions of the...

Medieval drama based on the Bible commonly directs its audiences toward a Christian interpretation, but equally interesting, and less frequently investigated by scholars, are the plays' modes of resistance to Christian authority. Through a reading...

This lively, lucid book undertakes a detailed study of Shakespeare's fascination with clowns, fools, and fooling. From the knockabout clowns of the early comedies, through the wise fools of the mature plays, to disturbing tragic figures who play the...

Christin Essin documents theatre's backstage history through the cultural roles played by designers during the modern development of their profession. Featuring work by Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Aline Bernstein, Norman Bel Geddes, Mordecai...

A forgotten yet award-winning playwright, Cal Yeomans was one of the founders of gay theatre whose work was fueled by gay liberation and extinguished by the AIDS epidemic. Exploring both sex and sexuality so candidly, he burst the boundaries of what was...

No play in the history of the American stage has been as ubiquitous and as widely viewed as Uncle Tom's Cabin. This book traces the major dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's classic from its inception in 1852 through "modern" versions on film. Frick

The theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theater history and literary scholarship, offer a hybrid theater that integrates the popular with the formal, the mainstream with the...

Contemporary Irish drama communicates not only through words but also through the non-verbal use of space -- both the geographical places in which plays are set and the ways stage space is used. The work of cultural and physical geographers, brought to...