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Peter Buse illuminates the relationship between modern British drama and contemporary critical and cultural theory. He demonstrates how theory allows fresh insights into familiar drama, pairing well-known plays with classic theory texts. The theoretical text is more than applied to the dramatic text, instead Buse shows how they reflect on each other. Drama + Theory provides not only provides new interpretations of popular plays, but of the theoretical texts as well.
"In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl - both historical figure and fictional heroine - from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. As the author reveals, the shopgirl embodied the fantasies associated with a growing consumer culture: romantic adventure, upward mobility, and the acquisition of material goods. Reading novels such as George Gissing's The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage as well as short stories, musical comedies, and films, Sanders argues that the London shopgirl appeared in the midst of controversies over sexual morality and the pleasures and dangers of London itself. Sanders explores the shopgirl's centrality to modern conceptions of fantasy, desire, and everyday life for working women and argues for her as a key figure in cultural and social histories of the period. This study will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature."--BOOK JACKET.
This authoritative and innovative volume explores the place of Shakespeare in relation to a wide range of artistic practices and activities, past and present.
Women's Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain is the first book to make a comprehensive study of women playwrights in the British theatre from 1820 to 1918. It looks at how women playwrights negotiated their personal and professional identities as writers, and examines the female tradition of playwriting which dramatises the central experience of women's lives around the themes of home, the nation, and the position of women in marriage and the family. The book also includes an extensive Appendix of authors and plays, which will be a useful reference tool for students and scholars in nineteenth-century studies and theatre historians.
Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. I...
Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particu...
The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance presents the most influential and widely-known, critical work on gender and performing arts, together with exciting and provocative new writings. It provides systematically arranged articles to guide the reader from topic to topic, and specially linked articles by scholars and teachers to explain key issues and put the extracts in context. This comprehensive volume: * reviews women's contributions to theatre history * includes contributions from many of the top academics in this discipline * examines how theatre has represented women over the centuries * introduces readers to major theoretical approaches and more complex questions about gender, the body and cross-dressing * offers an international perspective, including material from post-apartheid South Africa and post-communist Russia.
An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the era, this Companion explores influential dramatic works by Ibsen, Shaw and Wilde; the poetry of mourning; novelistic genres, including social problem novels and sensation fiction; and the literature of the fin de siècle’s aesthetes and decadents. Cultural and historical debates – focussing on empire, national identity, science and evolution, print culture and gender – supply essential context alongside discussion of relevant critical theory.
The Theatre of Caryl Churchill documents and analyses the major plays and productions of one of Britain's greatest and most innovative playwrights. Drawing on hundreds of never-before-seen archival sources from the US and the UK, it provides an essential guide to Churchill's groundbreaking work for students and theatregoers. Each chapter illuminates connections across plays and explores major scripts alongside unpublished and unfinished projects. Each considers the rehearsal room, the stage, and the printed text. Each demonstrates how Churchill has pushed the boundaries of dramatic aesthetics while posing urgent political and theoretical questions. But since each maps Churchill's work in a different way, each deploys a different reading practice - for many approaches are necessary to characterise such a restlessly imaginative and prolific career. Through its five interlocking parts, The Theatre of Caryl Churchill tells a story about the playwright, her work, and its place in contemporary drama.