Theatre studies Books

***Listed in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION's Weekly Book List, July 11, 2011*** Identifying an apprehension about the nature and constitution of urbanism in North American plays, Urban Drama examines how cities like New York City and Los Angeles...

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including...

Chronicling over forty years of critical changes in African-American expressive and popular culture, covering diverse forms of music, dance, and comedy, the Regal Theater (1928-1968) was the largest and most architecturally splendid movie-stage-show...

This is the first book-length study, in any language, of the influence of Mei Lanfang - the internationally known Chinese actor who specialized in female roles - on the twentieth-century international stage. Focusing on Mei Lanfang's tours of Japan, the...

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of dramas such as Augustus Thomas's Arizona (1900), Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian (1904), Edwin Milton Royle's The...

Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's...

Shakespeare's company coped with an enormous mnemonic load, performing up to six different plays a week. How did they do it? Cognition in the Globe addresses this question through the lens of Distributed Cognition. This is a dynamic model that attends to...

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, which suggests that "absurd" plays purport the meaninglessness of life, Michael Y. Bennett's Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd is a timely reassessment of one of the most...

Where science has often been used to explore the questions raised by art, this book does the reverse, suggesting that art can address a problem raised by science: the deep challenge to ethics posed by Darwin's discovery that we are intentional beings...

Shakespearean Neuroplay provides a methodology for applying cognitive science to the study of drama and performance. With Shakespeare's Hamlet as a test subject and the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual blending as a tool, Cook unravels the...

Shakespeare and His Contemporaries begins with Shakespeare's England and expands to a world before, after, and beyond. With an eye to language, genre, drama, and literary and historical narrative, this book examines the comedy of Shakespeare in the...

Wonder is a highly ambivalent word and idea which can denote woe, horror, or terror on one hand and delight, jubilation, or ecstasy on the other. In the first part of this book, Adam Max Cohen embraces the many meanings of wonder in order to challenge...

This book focuses on the ways in which military technology, political and social trends, and shifting frontiers shaped the emergence of new forms of public authority and civic life as embodied in the "wall," an image at once intensely physical and deeply...

In Argentine theatre spanning from the democratic transition to the early twenty-first century, the expression of human fragility has taken diverse forms, revealing the transformative engagement of performance with memory politics and human rights over...

The urgent debate about torture in public discourse of the twenty-first century thrusts pain into the foreground while research in neuroscience is transforming our understanding of this fundamental human experience. In late-medieval France, a country...

In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson's physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople's interactions with other devotional media-such as...

This book contains an account of language and drama between 1945 and 2005, synthesizing linguistic and dramatic knowledge in order to illuminate the ways in which anxieties and attitudes toward language manifest themselves in discourses on and around...

Notes on Contributors Introduction: Contesting Performance in an Age of Globalization; J.McKenzie, C.J.W.-L.Wee & H.Roms PART I: INSTITUTIONALIZING PERFORMANCE STUDIES The Many Lives of Performance: The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics;...

Samuel Beckett and the Prosthetic Body is a study of the representation of the body in Samuel Beckett's work (both novels and plays), specifically focused on the 'prosthetic' aspect of the organs and senses. While making use of the theoretical potential...

Theatre and Event: Staging the European Century, examines how, in these first decades of the twenty-first century, contemporary European theatre-makers have sought to consider the disastrous events of the twentieth century as the 'unfinished business' of...

Featuring original essays by leading scholars in the field, this bookexplores the immense legacy of women playwrights in Irish theatre since the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapters consider the intersecting contexts of gender, sexuality and the...

How might theatre intervene in violent inter-ethnic conflicts? This book addresses this question through detailed case studies in the Balkans and the Middle East, showing how theatrical facilitations model ways that ethnic oppositions can move towards...

This exciting book uniquely combines interviews with scholars and practitioners in theatre studies to look at what most people feel is a pivotal moment of British theatre--the 1990s. Featuring interviews with key names in the field (including Max...

This bold and wide-ranging study takes a fresh look at a controversial question: what do the acts and shows of grief performed in early modern drama tell us about the religious culture of the world in which they were historically staged? Many rites of...

The most authoritative, authentic text of a classic guide to actingIn the four decades since its first publication, Michael Chekhov's To the Actor has become a standard text for students of the theater. But To the Actor is a shortened, heavily modified...

For nearly a decade, Jackie Apodaca and Michael Kostroff shared duties as advice columnists for the actors' trade paper, Backstage. Their highly popular weekly feature, "The Working Actor," fielded questions from actors all over the country. A cross...

The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers, reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, reframing the...

Acknowledgements Introduction: Performing Cosmopolitics (Anti)Cosmopolitan Encounters Indigenizing Australian Theatre Asianizing Australian Theatre Marketing Difference at the Adelaide Festival Crossing Cultures: Case Studies Asian Australian Hybrid...