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"To understand the history and spirit of America, one must know its wars, its laws, and its presidents. To really understand it, however, one must also know its cheeseburgers, its love songs, and its lawn ornaments. The long-awaited Guide to the United States Popular Culture provides a single-volume guide to the landscape of everyday life in the United States. Scholars, students, and researchers will find in it a valuable tool with which to fill in the gaps left by traditional history. All American readers will find in it, one entry at a time, the story of their lives."--Robert Thompson, President, Popular Culture Association. "At long last popular culture may indeed be given its due within ...
Of the many dynamic, young playwrights to be associated with the "In-Yer-Face" burst of creative talent on the British stage in the mid-1990s, Joe Penhall has challenged Britain's status quo the most. Penhall believes his plays should constantly provoke and enrage not only the institutions he targets, but also his audience. This critical book discusses the argumentative nature of Penhall's plays, while also placing them within the context of contemporary British society and the modern dramatic tradition. His eight plays are discussed in detail, and particular attention is paid to male identity, the nature of grief, the variety of females, domestic drama, and the role of autobiography in his work.
The past few decades have seen a remarkable surge in Jewish influences on American culture. Entertainers and artists such as Jerry Seinfeld, Adam Sandler, Allegra Goodman, and Tony Kushner have heralded new waves of television, film, literature, and theater; a major klezmer revival is under way; bagels are now as commonplace as pizza; and kabbalah has become as cool as crystals. Does this broad range of cultural expression accurately reflect what it means to be Jewish in America today? Bringing together fourteen new essays by leading scholars, You Should See Yourself examines the fluctuating representations of Jewishness in a variety of areas of popular culture and high art, including litera...
The 15th in a series drawn from scholarship presented at the annual Comparative Drama Conference at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, this collection provides insights into texts and practices currently at the forefront of theatrical discussion. The volume includes various essays on the intersections of script and performance, and features an exclusive interview with keynote speaker, playwright Simon Stephens.
Features a comprehensive guide to American dramatic literature, from its origins in the early days of the nation to the groundbreaking works of today's best writers.
It is a fact that today’s British stages resound with powerfully innovative voices and that, very often, these voices have been those of young women playwrights. This collection of essays gives visibility and pride of place to these fascinating voices by exploring the vitality, inventiveness and particularly strong relevance of these poetics. These women playwrights sometimes invent radically new forms and sometimes experiment with conventional ones in fresh and unexpected ways, as for example when they re-energize naturalism and provide it with new missions. The plays that are addressed are all concerned with the necessity to grasp the complexity of the contemporary world and to further investigate what it means to be human. Intimate or epic, and sometimes both at once, visionary or closer to everyday life, these plays approach the contemporary world through a multitude of prisms – historical, scientific, political and poetic – and open different and visionary perspectives.
This volume is the seventeenth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest findings in the fields of comparative drama and performance. Featuring eleven essays from the 2021 Comparative Drama Conference in Orlando, it includes new research on contemporary plays by Anne Washburn, Will Arbery, Matthew Lopez, Anna Deveare Smith and Qui Nguyen. Chapters also present new research for classic plays such as Measure for Measure and Cyrano, arguments for teaching science through drama, changing approaches for training actors, and using the insights of neuroscience to lure audiences back to live theatre. This year's volume also features a new interview with playwright Anne Washburn and seven book reviews centered on drama and theatre studies.
Contemporary Farce on the Global Stage provides audiences and practitioners a detailed survey of how the genre of farce has evolved in the 21st century. Often dismissed as frivolous, farce speaks a universal language, with the power to incisively interrogate our world through laughter. Unlike farces of the past, where a successful resolution was a given and we could laugh uproariously at adulterous behaviour, farce no longer guarantees an audience a happy ending where everything works out. Contemporary farce is no longer ‘diverting us’ with laughter. It is reflecting the fractured world around us. With a foreword by award-winning playwright Ken Ludwig, the book introduces readers to the ...
This volume is the sixteenth in a series dedicated to presenting the latest findings in the fields of comparative drama, performance, and dramatic textual analysis. Featuring some of the best work from the 2019 Comparative Drama Conference in Orlando, this book engages audiences with new research on contemporary and classic drama, performance studies, scenic design and adaptation theory in nine scholarly essays, two event transcripts and six book reviews. This year's highlights include an interview with playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a roundtable discussion on the sixtieth anniversary of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.