Search results

These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current...

This volume is a response to the growing need for new methodological approaches to the rapidly changing landscape of new forms of performative practices. The authors address a host of contemporary phenomena situated at the crossroads between science and fiction which employ various media and merge live participation with mediated hybrid experiences at both affective and cognitive level. All essays collected here move across disciplinary divisions in order to provide an account of these new tende...

Looking at European drama through an ecological lens, this book chronicles nature and the environment as primary topics in major plays from ancient to recent times. Cless focuses on the few, yet well-known plays in which nature is at stake in the action or the environment is a dramatic force. Though theater predominantly explores human and cultural themes, these plays fully display the power of the other-than-human world and its endangerment during the history of Europe. While offering a broad o...

This volume deals with the commitment in the defense of egalitarian values by theatrical creators of the Spanish republican exile of 1939. Their innovative narrative and visual discourse offer models of masculinity and femininity that represent the change in gender paradigms derived from the rising leading role of women in the public sphere.

"Riotous Performances is a thorough and daring analysis of the theater as a cultural space. Through this work Burke recovers the voices of the dispossessed Irish and the non-elite members of the Dublin audience. I think it will be essential reading for those interested in Irish Studies and eighteenth-century English literature." -Christopher Wheatley, Catholic University of America Riotous Performances explores the significance of theater "riots" and other disruptive practices that occurred in...

Das Buch befasst sich mit dem Zentralproblem des politischen Kabaretts, dem grundlegenden Widerspruch von Absicht und Wirklichkeit, erstrebter politischer Opposition und ausbleibender oder gegenteiliger Wirkung in der Geschichte des politischen Kabaretts. Dieses bisher von der Forschung gemiedene Problem wird hier in einem historischen Abriss fur die Geschichte der politischen Satire und des politischen Kabaretts als ihrer jungsten Erscheinungsform erstmals dargestellt und als der Satire immanen...

A seminal study of a historically significant theater style.   Unrivaled in its long-term impact, Parsi theater remains a crucial component of South Asia’s cultural heritage. Like vaudeville in America, Parsi theater dominated mass entertainment in colonial India in the era before cinema. Drawn by the magic of sight and sound, crowds filled the country’s urban playhouses each night. Marked by extravagant acting, operatic singing, and melodramatic stage effects, this cosmopolitan theater brough...

"Latin American Women Dramatists: Theater, Texts, and Theories" discusses 15 works of Latin-American playwrights. Contributors delineate the artistic lives of women dramatists of the last half of the twentieth century - from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela and highlight the problems inherent in writing under politically repressive governments. They also illustrate through the writers' experiences that gender difference entails both loss and pr...

The first in a series on Shakespeare's original texts, including facsimile pages, this version of "Hamlet" is claimed to be, in some ways, the most authentic version of the play that we have. Included are an introduction, notes, and a theoretical, historical and contextual critique. This text has been rejected by scholars as a "bad Quarto" - corrupt and pirated text printed without the permission of the playwright or his company. Nonetheless, it was the first version of the play to be published...

On a warm, humid night in June of 1962, four amateur actors sat on stools in the Court House of Niagara-on-the-Lake for their first performance of Don Juan in Hell from George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. It was a "modest" first performance, without the pomp and circumstance of other theatre openings, and many were unsure of the lifespan of such a theatre experience. So began founder Brian Doherty's Shaw Festival, or as it was humbly called in the beginning, A Salute to Shaw. Entering its s...

Archaeological and written sources relating to classical Greek theatre are diverse, scattered, and disconnected. Clifford Ashby's own (and memorable) fieldwork led him to more than one hundred theatre sites in Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, and Albania and as far into modern Turkey as Hellenic civilization had penetrated. From this extensive research, he draws a number of novel revisionist conclusions on the nature of classical theatre architecture and production. Ashby's lengthy hands-on train...

This volume explores the constitutive role played by space in the performance of Kutiyattam. The only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam is distinctive in terms of its performance conventions and its unique culture of extensive elaboration and interpretation. Drawing upon the concepts of phenomenology on the processes of perception, particularly on the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it analyses the role of space in the communicative structures of...

Responding to the worldwide impact of the #MeToo movement, this volume investigates not only the ubiquity of sexual abuse and sexual violence but also the transhistorical and transnational failure to hold perpetrators accountable. From a range of disciplines, the collected essays engage current cultural and political discourses about systemic sexism, feminist theory and practice, and gender-based discrimination from an academic and activist perspective. The focus on national cultures of German-s...

Il libro si presenta come un lavoro monografico sulla produzione drammatica dell'autore tedesco Ernst Toller, con particolare riguardo alle opere nelle quali lo scrittore si confronta con il tema della rivoluzione, fondamentale per la storia della Germania nel periodo fra le due guerre mondiali. Il volume segue l'evoluzione del pensiero politico dell'autore, che alla luce degli avvenimenti del Novembre 1919, anno della Rivoluzione Tedesca, si interroga sulle modalita e sulla legittimita della ri...

Staging Egypt on the Global Stage is an extremely timely examination of Egyptian theatre and performance in relation to politics, looking back to the history of Egyptian performance right up to the present day and the background to recent events in Tahir Square. The book focuses on dramatic and other performative responses to changing realities in Egypt, and offers an important and much-needed new intervention to our understanding of the country's self-understanding and narratives.