Theatre studies Books

Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene Since its first staging in 2016, Estado Vegetal, Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art, has expanded philosophical thinking into a fully-fledged artistic inquiry of nonanthropocentric being. Through Infante’s polyvocal monologue, acted with impetus by Marcela Salinas, plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world in the face of incommensurable trauma and loss. This first book dedicated to Infante’s plant-focused performance features eight essays by scholars, poets, and artists whose practices draw from research fields as disparate as new materialism, anthropogenic feminism, queer studies, and speculative realism. Including an interview with Infante, the full playscript, and stills from the performance, Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking reveals the roles that plants in art can play in productively reconfiguring human–nonhuman relations within current anthropogenic perspectives. Infante’s performance is a perfect case study and reference point for anyone interested in exploring the complexities of plant-thinking through alternative and experimental avenues. Furthermore, this book is at once a critical plant studies primer and an artistic problematization of the philosophical questions that have been central to the latest multidisciplinary discussions on plant-being. Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Utrecht U; Lucy Cotter, Portland State U; Prudence Gibson, UNSW Sydney; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country; Dawn Sanders, U of Gothenburg; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, colectivo LASTESIS; Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Table of Contents Introduction Giovanni Aloi The Right of the Other: Interpretation in Four Acts Michael Marder Thinking in the World: Estado Vegetal as Thought-Apparatus Maaike Bleeker Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge Lucy Cotter Vegetal Mythologies: Potted Plants and Storymaking Giovanni Aloi Attending to “Plantness” in Estado Vegetal Dawn Sanders “I Can’t Move”: Plants and the Politics of Mobility in Estado Vegetal Catriona Sandilands and Prudence Gibson Feminist Structures: Polyphonic Networks Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem Soledad: After Estado Vegetal Mandy-Suzanne Wong In Conversation Manuela Infante and Giovanni Aloi Estado Vegetal Manuela Infante with Marcela Salinas Acknowledgments Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisInterdisciplinary essays on Manuela Infante’s award-winning play explore the relationship between critical plant studies and performance art in the Anthropocene Since its first staging in 2016, Estado Vegetal, Manuela Infante’s riveting piece of experimental performance art, has expanded philosophical thinking into a fully-fledged artistic inquiry of nonanthropocentric being. Through Infante’s polyvocal monologue, acted with impetus by Marcela Salinas, plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world in the face of incommensurable trauma and loss. This first book dedicated to Infante’s plant-focused performance features eight essays by scholars, poets, and artists whose practices draw from research fields as disparate as new materialism, anthropogenic feminism, queer studies, and speculative realism. Including an interview with Infante, the full playscript, and stills from the performance, Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking reveals the roles that plants in art can play in productively reconfiguring human–nonhuman relations within current anthropogenic perspectives. Infante’s performance is a perfect case study and reference point for anyone interested in exploring the complexities of plant-thinking through alternative and experimental avenues. Furthermore, this book is at once a critical plant studies primer and an artistic problematization of the philosophical questions that have been central to the latest multidisciplinary discussions on plant-being. Contributors: Maaike Bleeker, Utrecht U; Lucy Cotter, Portland State U; Prudence Gibson, UNSW Sydney; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country; Dawn Sanders, U of Gothenburg; Catriona Sandilands, York U; Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, colectivo LASTESIS; Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Table of Contents Introduction Giovanni Aloi The Right of the Other: Interpretation in Four Acts Michael Marder Thinking in the World: Estado Vegetal as Thought-Apparatus Maaike Bleeker Theatre as Thinking, Art as Nonknowledge Lucy Cotter Vegetal Mythologies: Potted Plants and Storymaking Giovanni Aloi Attending to “Plantness” in Estado Vegetal Dawn Sanders “I Can’t Move”: Plants and the Politics of Mobility in Estado Vegetal Catriona Sandilands and Prudence Gibson Feminist Structures: Polyphonic Networks Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem Soledad: After Estado Vegetal Mandy-Suzanne Wong In Conversation Manuela Infante and Giovanni Aloi Estado Vegetal Manuela Infante with Marcela Salinas Acknowledgments Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisGenerating a new understanding of the past--as well as a vision for the future--this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today. Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals." Author note: Paul Carter Harrison is playwright in residence at the Theatre Center, Columbia College, Chicago. He is the author of several books including, The Drama of Nommo and the editor of several play anthologies. His play, The Great MacDaddy, received an Obie Award for playwriting. Victor Leo Walker is Chief Executive Officer of the African Grove Institute for the Arts, Inc. and the author of The Cultural MatriX: Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center, 1965 to 1998 (forthcoming). Gus Edwards teaches Film Studies and directs a multi-ethnic theatre program at Arizona State University. He has published two volumes of monologues from his plays including The Offering, Black Body Blues, and Louie & Ophelia. He is coeditor with Paul Carter Harrison of the anthology, Classic Plays from the Negro Ensemble Company.Trade Review"Black Theatre is an indispensable volume-insightful, wide-ranging, global in scope-to be enjoyed, studied, mulled over and argued with."-Douglass Turner Ward, Founder of The Negro Ensemble Company "In 1970, in the heat of the Black Arts Movement, Paul Carter Harrison published his seminal The Drama of Nommo, challenging readers to look beyond the political orthodoxy of kitchen sink realism to discern the aesthetic foundations of black theatre. This present anthology demonstrates the impressive extent to which scholars, playwrights, and directors have built upon that call. Drawing from performance practices in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and black Britain, this landmark collection delineates the cultural specificity of an African diaspora theatre that, while it appears to 'wear the mask' of conformity to EuroAmerican values, enacts a profoundly different world view aimed at confronting an oppressive past and reaffirming the humanity of black peoples. The anthology's analytic rigor and creative insight set a challenge for subsequent generations to engage."-Sandra L. Richards, Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Northwestern University "The spirit and the intellect of the late Larry Neal, as well as the tremendously resilient legacy of the radical Black theatre movement of the sixties and seventies, animate most of the essays and documents collected in this volume. It is a feast of powerful critical and theoretical reflections on the past and the future of Black theatre in this country and in other parts of the African diaspora. Without the slightest nudge toward racial absolutism or essentialism, the volume is a model of how 'race' can be deployed as a subtle and progressive analytic category in contemporary dramatic and cultural criticism. This book should be compulsory reading for every student of contemporary theatre scholarship."-Biodun Jeyifo, Professor of English, Cornell University "...a powerful examination of ritual-based performance traditions practiced throughout the African diaspora. It belongs on the shelf of anyone studying black performance. [The editors] succeed on many levels with this collection of compelling articles...this text is a valuable contribution to current critical, historical and theoretical debate about this rich and varied field."-Theatre Research International "[E]ssential. This book illuminates, challenges, and expands the consciousness. It also inspires the reader..."-The African American Review "This book is a powerful examination of ritual-based performance traditions practiced throughout the African diaspora. It belongs on the shelf of anyone studying black performance... This text is a valuable contribution to current critical, historical and theoretical debate about this rich and varied field."-Theatre Research International "What is to be celebrated regarding this anthology is that it has been edited by black theater educators and practitioners."-Research in African Literatures "This important and groundbreaking collection of 32 essays is particularly valuable to those who have scant knowledge about African American theater, as the ideas are informing, eye-opening, and challenging."-Library JournalTable of ContentsPraise/Word - Paul Carter HarrisonPart I: African RootsIntroduction - Victor Leo Walker II1. Roots in African Drama and Theatre - J. C. de Graft2. The African Heritage of African American Art and Performance - Babatunde Lawal3. Agones: The Constitution of a Practice - Tejumola Olaniyan4. What the Twilight Says: An Overture - Derek Walcott5. Caribbean Narrative: Carnival Characters-In Life and in the Mind - Gus Edwards6. Rebaptizing the World in Our Own Terms: Black Theatre and Live Arts in Britain - Michael McMillan and SuAndiPart II: Mythology And MetaphysicsIntroduction - Victor Leo Walker II7. The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy - Wole Soyinka8. The Candomble and Eshu-Eleggua in Brazilian and Cuban Yoruba-Based Ritual - Marta Moreno Vega9. Legba and the Politics of Metaphysics: The Trickster in Black Drama - Femi Euba10. Art for Life's Sake: Rituals and Rights of Self and Other in the Theatre of Aime Cesaire - Keith L. Walker11. Sycorax Mythology - May Joseph12. Conjuring as Radical Re/Membering in the Works of Shay Youngblood - Joni L. Jones13. Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's Dutchman - Victor Leo Walker IIPart III: Dramaturgical PracticeIntroduction - Paul Carter Harrison14. The Dramaturg's Way: Meditations on the Cartographer at the Crossroads - Deborah Wood Holton15. Introduction to Moon Marked and Touched by Sun - Sydne Mahone16. Kennedy's Travelers in the American and African Continuum - Paul K. Bryant-Jackson17. Mojo and the Sayso: A Drama of Nommo That Asks, "Is Your Mojo Working?" - Andrea J.Nouryeh18. Ritual Poetics and Rites of Passage in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf - Jean YoungPart IV: PerformanceIntroduction - Gus Edwards19. Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music - Paul Carter Harrison20. The Sense of Self in Ritualizing New Performance Spaces for Survival - Beverly J. Robinson21. Barbara Ann Teer: From Holistic Training to Liberating Rituals - Lundeana M. Thomas22. Bopera Theory - Amiri Baraka23. From Hip-Hop to Hittite: Part X - Keith Antar Mason24. Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson - William W. Cook25. Porque Tu No M'entrende? Whatcha Mean You Can't Understand Me? - Ntozake Shange26. Performance Method - George C. Wolfe27. Afterword: Testimony of a Witness - Eleanor W. TraylorAbout the Contributors

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Book SynopsisInvestigates German religious drama since the 1970s, asking the question whether it develops religious themes or only exploits religious motifs, and exploring how it reflects the changing place of religion and spirituality in theworld. Critics often claim that the twenty-first century has seen a sudden "return" of religion to the German stage. But although drama scholarship has largely focused on politics, postmodernity, gender, ethnicity, and "postdramatic" performance, religious themes, forms, and motifs have been a topic and a source of inspiration for German dramatists for several decades, as this study shows. Focusing on works by four major dramatists - Botho Strauß, George Tabori,Werner Fritsch, and Lukas Bärfuss - this book examines how, why, and to what effect religion is invoked in German drama since the late 1970s. It asks whether contemporary German drama succeeds in developing religious insights or is at most quasi-religious, exploiting religious signs for aesthetic, theatrical, or dramaturgical ends. It considers the performative and historical intersections between drama and religion, contextualizing the playwrights' treatments of religion by exploring how they lean on or repudiate the traditions of modern European drama, especially that of Strindberg, the Expressionists, Artaud, Grotowski, and Beckett. It also draws on the sociology, anthropology,and psychology of religion, exploring how these works reflect the changing place of religion and spirituality in the world, from secularization to the "alternative" modes of religiosity that have proliferated in Western society since the 1960s. Sinéad Crowe is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Limerick, Ireland.Trade ReviewCrowe largely succeeds in reaching her objective of offering thought-provoking interpretations of religion in contemporary avant-gardist German-language theatre. In her analyses of religious elements in individual dramas, in particular, she provides models of thoughtful, well-researched commentary on the use of religion in literature in general, while taking full consideration of the context, the medium, and the audience. * SEMINAR *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Definitions and Themes The Relationship between Theater and Religion Religion in Modern European Theater and Drama "No One Wants to Get to God Anymore"? Botho Strauß's Groß und klein and Die eine und die andere Theological Farce: George Tabori's Mein Kampf "The Last Refuge for Metaphysics": Werner Fritsch's Theater Theory "The Feeling of Faith": Fritsch's Wondreber Totentanz and Aller Seelen Belief and Unbelief in the Twenty-First Century: Lukas Bärfuss's Der Bus (Das Zeug einer Heiligen) Conclusion Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA history -- the first ever -- of the abundant traditions of German-American musical theater in New York, and a treasure trove of songs and information. Nineteenth-century New York was, after Berlin and Vienna, the third largest German-populated city in the world. German-language musical plays and light operas held an important niche in the lives of German immigrants and their families. John Koegel's Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940, tells, for the first time, the engrossing story of these theater works, and the many musical numbers from them that became popular as separate songs. Koegel documents performances, in German, of plays by Shakespeare and Goethe and operas by Offenbach, Verdi, and Johann Strauss. And he draws long-needed attention to German-American musical comedies written, beginning in the 1890s, by ethnic parodist Adolf Philipp. As their titles suggest -- Der Corner Grocer aus der Avenue A and Der Pawnbroker von der Eastside -- these musicals related directly to the daily experiences of theimmigrant population. Music in German Immigrant Theater is enriched by copious photographs, sheet-music title pages, and musical examples, as well as numerous sets of song lyrics -- some uproarious, others touching --in German and in English translation. The accompanying CD includes recordings of many of the songs discussed in the book. John Koegel is Professor of Musicology at California State University, Fullerton. WINNER - 2009 ForeWord Reviews' Book of the Year Award, music category. This book is also included in the AAUP's 2010 University Press Books Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries along with a number of other URP books.Trade Review[M]agnificent and substantial . . . reveals long-forgotten legacies of shows, theaters, impresarios, composers, conductors, and performers. . . . The prose is lively, and many well-produced illustrations [including portraits, production photos, images of theaters, and sheet-music covers] add to the book's charm. . . . A twenty-track CD made expressly for the book allows the reader to hear gems from the repertory described in the prose. . . . Will be of interest to musicologists, theater, cultural, and immigrant historians, . . . German-studies scholars [and] a broader readership. -- William K. Kearns * AMERICAN MUSIC *A stunning model of empirical research. . . . Its wealth of detail will offer scholars an invaluable resource for many years to come. -- Nancy Newman * MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION NOTES *Broadly conceived, superbly researched, and elegantly written. . . . Beautifully produced, with over ninety illustrations. . . . The fundamental explication of a particularly long-lasting and influential tradition in our theatrical history. -- Stephen Ledbetter * JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR AMERICAN MUSIC *Thanks to John Koegel's magnificent and substantial tome, long-overdue light is shed on . . . long-forgotten legacies of shows, theaters, impresarios, composers, conductors, and performers. . . . The prose is lively, and many well-produced illustrations . . . add to the book's charm. . . . [The CD] allows the reader to hear gems from the repertory described in the prose. . . -- William A. Everett * AMERICAN MUSIC *Deep-delving. . . . Readable and entertaining. . . . A tour guide down a forgotten byway of the American immigrant experience, where life, at least sometimes, really was a cabaret. -- John W. Freeman * OPERA NEWS *From the foreword: Koegel's palette is rich, his canvas, huge: the reader will see both the forest and its trees. -- Peter Conolly-Smith, Queens College, City University of New YorkKoegel's book, with its numerous illustrations, takes its place in the pantheon of basic literature about the wondrous history of New York theatre. -- Miles Kreuger, president, The Institute of the American MusicalPacked with information. . . . The research that has gone into this volume is formidable. . . . Lively and elegant excerpts from these musical plays that are featured on a CD accompanying this volume [make one] wish that such works . . . still had a stage life. -- Simon Williams * JOURNAL OF MUSICOLOGICAL RESEARCH *Table of ContentsGerman American Theater and Society Early Struggles, Operatic Beginnings, and the Development of the German Theater in New York City, 1840-1872 Musical Farce and Folk Play at the Germania Theater, 1872-1883 Ethnic Spaces: Theatrical Entertainments in German Beer Gardens and Concert Halls An Orgy of Operetta: The Thalia and Amberg Theaters, 1879-1893 Drama on a Higher Plane: The Irving Place Theater, 1893-1918 German American Performers The "Dutch" Act: German American Theatrical and Literary Representations Philipp's Germania Theater Musical Comedies, 1893-1902 The German American Musical Abroad: Philipp in Berlin, 1903-1907 From Klein Deutschland to Broadway: Philipp's Works, 1907-1914 Divided Loyalties: World War I and Its Aftermath The Decline of the German American Stage in the 1920s and 1930s Appendixes Archives and Collections Consulted Key to Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book describes the "glory years" of Ira Aldridge's first Continental tour, during which he won more awards and honors, often conferred by royalty, than any other actor of his day. Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852-1855, the third volume of Bernth Lindfors's award-winning biography, traces the American-born black classical actor's itinerary on his first Continental tour. Starting inBrussels and following Aldridge up the Rhine to Basel, on to Berlin and Vienna, and cities in Prussia and Hungary, Lindfors recounts the major performances and analyzes audience responses to them. Because European audiences wanted to see this "African" actor in Shakespearean roles rather than in the melodramas and farces that were popular in Britain, Aldridge concentrated almost exclusively on performing as Othello, Shylock, Macbeth, and Richard III. He performed the roles in English even when acting with local companies who spoke in German, Hungarian, or another European language. Aldridge's impressive manner of interpreting these characters won him many honors, awards, and medals, some bestowed by heads of state or by national academies. Drawing on myriad reviews, playbills, and letters, many of them penned by Aldridge himself, Lindfors examines in detail Aldridge's interpretations of these timeless characters and shows why these were Aldridge's glory years. Bernth Lindfors, professor emeritus of English and African Literatures, University of Texas at Austin, is the author of Ira Aldridge: The Early Years, 1807-1833 and Ira Aldridge: The Vagabond Years, 1833-1852, both published by the University of Rochester Press in 2011.Trade ReviewWinner of the Theatre Library Association's 2015 George Freedley Award Special Jury Prize * . *As a meticulously researched study with superb supplementary materials, Lindfor's book is a very valuable historical resource. * THEATRE SURVEY *The third volume of Bernth Lindfor's estimable multi-volume biography of Aldridge provides an in-depth, thoroughly researched account of Alridge's 1852-1855 Continental tour. * NEW THEATRE QUARTERLY *Recommended. * CHOICE *Bernth Lindfors's Aldridge series is a breathtaking and ambitious project of both superlative scholarship and the utmost historical importance, written in a precise, fluent, and charming style that is straightforward and authoritative. In Ira Aldridge: Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852-1855, Lindfors provides much new information on topics such as Aldridge's character, acting style, use of gesture and voice, performance strategies, and ideological disposition that will become anchoring reference points for future scholarship. --Colin Chambers, author of Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History * . *Table of ContentsIntroduction Making Up a Company Brussels Navigating up the Rhine Moving into the Interior Berlin On to Vienna Hungarian Rhapsodies Comparisons and Contrasts Personal and Personnel Matters Hungarian Rap Sheet Prussia, Germany, Switzerland Homeward Bound Interpreting Shakespeare Further Travels Appendixes Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis final volume of Bernth Lindfors's definitive biography records the remarkable achievements and experiences of Ira Aldridge in the last years of his life, when he performed at theaters throughout Europe. Ira Aldridge The Last Years, 1855-1867, the fourth volume of Bernth Lindfors's definitive biography, places on record Aldridge's remarkable achievements and experiences in the final phase of his life, when he performed at theaters throughout Europe. His first Continental tour in 1852-1855 had been a spectacular success, and though he returned to Britain periodically afterwards, he spent much of the remainder of his career entertaining audiences in central and eastern Europe, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. His Shakespearean performances in St. Petersburg in 1858 and Moscow in 1862 were among his greatest triumphs and led to numerous appearances elsewhere in provincial cities and towns. During his forty-three years on stage in Europe, Ira Aldridge traveled more widely and won more honors, decorations, and awards than any other actor of his day. He is remembered not only as a talented thespian but also as a very visible representative of his race, someone who changed European perceptions of black people through the sheer brilliance of his artistry on stage. And by doing so, he helped to humanize the image of Africans andtheir descendants in Europe at an important transitional moment in history, when the movement to abolish slavery was gathering force and winning international acceptance. Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African literatures at the University of Texas at Austin.Trade ReviewThrough his thorough mining of a vast array of European archives, Lindfors surpasses all previous studies in recounting the actions of, and wildly contradictory viewpoints towards, this seminal figure ... his absolute mastery of the sources and deep understanding of Aldridge and the period lead to probing insights. * THEATRE JOURNAL *With Ira Aldridge The Last Years, 1855-1867, Berth Lindfors concludes what will surely remain the definitive biography of the great nineteenth-century African American actor, Ira Aldridge, for many a decade ... Through an exhaustive search of local reviews and commentary he is able not only to follow Aldridge on his travels, but also to provide a wide range of observations on the actor's technique and artistic success. * RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURE *Winner of the Theatre Library Association's 2015 George Freedley Award Special Jury Prize * . *Lindfors's four-volume biography is destined to become the standard life of Aldridge, without equal in the future. Highly recommended. * CHOICE *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Readjusting to Britain Crim. Con. On the Road Again Stockholm The Second Continental Tour Pest and Buda A Short Break The Third Continental Tour Home Again The Fourth Continental Tour The Fifth Continental Tour The Sixth Continental Tour Taking a Break The Seventh Continental Tour Another Break The Eighth Continental Tour The Ninth Continental Tour Final Acts Postmortem Notes Selected Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisCollective identities grow from a sense of the past, and the theatre very forcefully participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, sometimes by contesting them and sometimes by reinforcing them. In his examination of the ways in which the theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, Freddie Rokem shows us that by ""performing history"" actors - as witnesses for the departed witnesses - bring the historical past and the theatrical present together. Rokem analyzes the significance of stage representations of the French Revolution and the Holocaust in different national contexts: the United States and Europe for performances about the French Revolution and Israel for performances about the Holocaust. By pointing out both the great diversity and the common features of these performances, he draws attention to the complex collective efforts and the creativity of playwrights, directors, designers and actors as they connect their theatrical energies to a specific historical past. He also focuses on the ways in which audiences in different cultures have been affected by and even had an influence on the ideological debates embedded in these performances. Rokem looks at plays and performances by Yehoshua Sobol, Dudu Ma'ayan and Hanoch Levin in Israel; Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkin and Ingmar Bergman in Europe; and Orson Welles, Herbert Blau and Robert Wilson in the United States. Drawing upon these and upon his own life in Europe, Israel and the United States, Rokem makes us aware of the critical interaction between the failures of history and the efforts to create viable and meaningful works of art.Trade ReviewIn this engaging new consideration of the relationship between history and theatre, Freddie Rokem uses the brilliant strategy of analyzing a series of theatrical attempts to treat that historical event that many have characterized as beyond artistic representation, the Shoah, alongside a series that have treated that event which from the beginning was conceived in theatrical terms, the French Revolution. The result of this inspired pairing is a book that throws important new light upon the role of theatre as witness to the past. - MARVIN CARLSON, Sidney E. Cohn Professor of Theatre, Graduate Center, City University of New York

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Book SynopsisThis is an exploration of Greek theatre as seen through its many depictions in classical art. "The Art of Ancient Greek Theater" addresses the vibrant imprint that ancient Greek tragedy and comedy left on the visual arts of classical Greece. Theatrical performance as we know it originated in mid-sixth century BCE with choral dances held in honour of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and patron of the theatre. The great tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander are preserved as some of the world's most revered literature and have formed the basis for theatrical performance up to the modern day. Over 90 objects - pottery vases, sculpture, reliefs, and masks - from museums across the world are featured with nine insightful essays and over 130 illustrations revealing the origins of Greek theatre and its multifaceted representation in the visual arts.

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Book SynopsisNew laws enacted in the wake of Hitler's ascent to power removed all Jews from their professional workplaces and banned Jewish artists from any collaboration with their fellow citizens. In the summer of 1933, Goebbels's Prussian Theatre Commission approved an all-Jewish theatre as part of the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, the Cultural Association of German Jewry. This network of Jewish cultural leagues and theatre ensembles across Germany coexisted with Nazi policies against Jews until the Gestapo dissolved the theatre in 1941. Revealing the complex interplay between history and human lives under conditions of duress, Rebecca Rovit focuses on the eight-year odyssey of the Berlin Kulturbund and its theatre. Rovit draws upon a wealth of primary documents - correspondence between the theatre and the Reich Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, actual playscripts and rolebooks, production reviews and photographs, letters and memoirs, and interviews with artists who survived the war - to show how the increasingly restrictive German reality forced Jewish artists to define and redefine their identity and culture under wrenching conditions of censorship, compromise, danger, and deception. Integrating play analysis with cultural history, she considers first the playscript itself, then the playscript adapted by the Kulturbund, then the best reconstruction possible of the actual performance against its backdrop of the Third Reich. Proceeding chronologically through the playing seasons, she focuses on the actual repertoire performed (and forbidden) over the life of the Berlin Kulturbund theatre, covering the theatre's beginnings and its first two playing seasons, then on the playing seasons that led to the Reichskristallnacht, and finally on the ways that emigration and increased censorship affected the wartime theatre's final days. The Kulturbund's directors were repeatedly caught between escalating demands from their Nazi overseers and from their own Jewish constituents. By examining why and how an all-Jewish repertory theatre could coexist with the Nazi regime, Rovit raises broader questions about the nature of art in an environment of coercion and isolation, artistic integrity and adaptability, and community and identity.

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Book SynopsisMusicals, it is often said, burst into song and dance when mere words can no longer convey the emotion. This book argues that musicals burst into song and dance when one body can no longer convey the emotion. Rogers shows how the musical's episodes of burlesque and minstrelsy model the kinds of radical relationships that the genre works to create across the different bodies of its performers, spectators, and creators every time the musical bursts into song. These radical relationships - borne of the musical's obsessions with 'bad' performances of gender and race - are the root of the genre's progressive play with identity, and thus the source of its subcultural power. However, this leads to an ethical dilemma: Are the musical's progressive politics thus rooted in its embrace of regressive entertainments like burlesque and minstrelsy?The Song Is You shows how musicals return again and again to this question, and grapple with a guilt that its joyous pleasures are based on exploiting the laboring bodies of its performers. Rogers argues that the discourse of 'integration' - which claims that songs should advance the plot - has functioned to deny the radical work that the musical undertakes every time it transitions into song and dance. Looking at musicals from The Black Crook to Hamilton, Rogers confronts the gendered and racial dynamics that have always under-girded the genre, and asks how we move forward.Trade Review“Bradley Rogers takes us on an adventure through American musical theatre to prove that the much-touted concept of integration is a fraud. Discovering new rhythms, new pleasures, and new choreographies in canonical and noncanonical musicals alike, The Song Is You represents revisionist history at its most invigorating.”—David Savran, author, Highbrow/ Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class “Rogers charts a fascinating and important new road through musical theatre theory, connecting the genre’s roots in minstrelsy, burlesque, and vaudeville with performative impersonations, psychic displacements, and most of all, a repudiation of integration. His argument, both elegant and persuasive, attends to the dynamics of performance and reception within the realms of history, politics, power, gender, race, and the body.”—Stacy Wolf, author, Beyond Broadway: The Pleasure and Promise of Musical Theatre Across America

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Book SynopsisBloody Tyrants and Little Pickles traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the possibilities and the problems girl performers presented as they adopted the manners and clothing of boys, entered spaces intended for adults, and assumed characters written for men. It asks why masculine roles like Young Norval, Richard III, Little Pickle, and Shylock came to seem 'normal' and 'natural' for young white girls to play, and it considers how playwrights, managers, critics, and audiences sought to contain or fix the at-times dangerous plasticity they exhibited both on and off the stage.Schweitzer analyzes the formation of a distinct repertoire for girls in the first half of the nineteenth century, which delighted in precocity and playfulness and offered up a model of girlhood that was similarly joyful and fluid. This evolving repertoire reflected shifting perspectives on girls' place within Anglo-American society, including where and how they should behave, and which girls had the right to appear at all.Trade ReviewMarlis Schweitzer brings girl actresses Jean Davenport and Clara Fisher back to vibrant life and reveals how Anglo-American girlhood was performed—on and off the stage. Deeply researched and energetically written, this book revises our established conceptions of the nineteenth-century stage." —Sarah E. Chinn, author, Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage"In this wide-ranging, lively, erudite book, Schweitzer recovers the plastic performances of nineteenth-century white girls. On stages from Britain to North America and beyond, their bodies became sites for cultural experiments in gender, age, and nation. Restoring Anglo-American white girls to their central but overlooked place in theatre history, this book decisively expands understanding of nineteenth-century repertoires." —Robin Bernstein, author, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

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Book SynopsisAs feminism gained prominence in twentieth-century popular culture, dramatic conventions progressed accordingly, offering larger and more diverse roles for women characters. Feminist Rehearsals documents the early stages of feminist theatre in Argentina and Mexico, revealing how various aspects of performance culture—spectator formation, playwriting, professional acting and directing, and dramatic techniques—paralleled political activism and championed the goals of the women’s rights movement. Through performance and protest, feminists enacted new identities and pushed for myriad social and legislative reforms during a time when women were denied suffrage and full citizenship status. Together, feminist theatre and demonstrations politicized women spectators’ collective presence and promoted women’s rights in the public sphere.Trade Review“This study provides a deserved platform for female artists and activists who continue to exert influence over our understanding of the role of the arts in inspiring a questioning of dominant patriarchal values. Most importantly, it will update everyone’s ideas of what constitutes a theatre history in the dynamic field that is Latin American theatre, especially as it relates to feminist movements across the Americas."—Analola Santana, author, Freak Performances: Dissidence in Latin American Theater"Feminist Rehearsals is an impressive study of the political, sociocultural, and intellectual struggles women playwrights, actresses, and activist pioneers experienced during the early twentieth century in Argentina and Mexico. With a fresh look at feminist theory and practice, Farnsworth offers a crucial analysis regarding the role women had in the public sphere through the lens of theatre and performance studies."—Paola HernÁndez, author, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives"An authoritative, nuanced, and thoughtful analysis of the role of feminist political and aesthetic movements in Argentina and Mexico, Feminist Rehearsals offers new insights into how women in the Americas create space for feminist spectatorship in the twentieth century. This book is for anyone engaged in feminist performance scholarship."—E. J. Westlake, Ohio State University

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Book SynopsisVows, Veils, and Masks offers a bold and timely approach to the plays of Eugene O’Neill with its attention to the engagements, weddings, and marriages so crucial to the tragic action in O’Neill’s works. Specifically, the book examines the culturally sanctioned traditions and gender roles that underscored marital life in the early twentieth century, and that still haunt and define love and partnership in the modern age. Weaving in artifacts like advice columns, advertisements, theatrical reviews, and even the lived experiences of the actors who brought O’Neill’s wife characters to life, Beth Wynstra points to new ways of seeing and empathizing with those who are betrothed and new possibilities for reading marriage in literary and dramatic works. She suggests that the various ways women were, and still are, expected to divert from their true ambitions, desires, and selves in the service of appropriate wifely behavior is a detrimental performance and one at the crux of O’Neill’s marital tragedies. This book invites more inclusive and nuanced ways of thinking about the choices married characters must make and the roles they play, both on and off the stage.Trade Review“Due to her fresh approach to womanhood in O’Neill’s plays, Wynstra contributes to the rejuvenation of the studies on the playwright. She convincingly makes her case against the restrictive labeling of female/male behaviors in O’Neill’s pieces and deconstructs an analytical trend, which tends to disregard the cultural patterns that underpinned marital life.”—Emeline Jouve, author, Unspeakable Acts: Murder by Women“Wynstra argues persuasively against common notions of women/wives as ‘villains’ in many of O’Neill’s plays, and provides a cultural context that defines them more sympathetically. Her book offers a timely and compelling contribution to O’Neill studies and American theatre history. Its contemporary cultural relevance on gender-based social issues extends its appeal to an even broader audience.”—Steven F. Bloom, author, Student Companion to Eugene O’Neill

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Book SynopsisPolish Theatre Revisited explores nineteenth-century Polish theatre through the lens of theatre audiences. Agata Łuksza places special emphasis on the most engaged spectators, known as “theatremaniacs”—from what they wore, to what they bought, to what they ate. Her source material is elusive ephemera from fans’ lives, such as notes scribbled on a weekly list of shows in the Warsaw theatres, collections of theatre postcards, and recipes for sweets named after famous actors. The fannish behavior of theatremaniacs was usually deemed excessive or in poor taste by people in positions of power, as it clashed with the ongoing embourgeoisement of the theatre and the disciplining of audiences. Nevertheless, the theatre was one of the key areas where early fan cultures emerged, and theatremaniacs indulged in diverse fan practices in opposition to the forces reforming the theatre and its spectatorship.Trade ReviewA brilliant example of how theatre is not only a national history repository, but of how the conversations across the footlights between actors and audiences can be highly provocative, political, and empathetic concurrently. Łuksza’s vivid descriptions of nineteenth-century Polish theatremania celebrate and apotheosize fan and actor practices in this long overdue, illuminating book." - Caroline Heim, author, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-first Century"The future of fan studies lies in new historical and cross-cultural scholarship; and here, Łuksza boldly offers both. Through imaginative research, Łuksza excavates hidden elements of nineteenth-century Polish theatre life, shaped by charismatic stars, rival audiences, and resistance politics, establishing Warsaw’s ‘theatremaniacs’ as a definitive example of historical fandom." - Daniel Cavicchi, author, Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum

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Book SynopsisLife in Iran as an artist under the Shah and during the Iranian Revolution A Man of the Theater tells the personal story of a theater artist caught between the two great upheavals of Iranian history in the 20th century. One is the White Revolution of the 1960s, the incomplete and uneven modernization imposed from the top by the dictatorial regime of the Shah, coming in the wake of the overthrow of the popular Mosaddegh government with the help of the CIA. The other one is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a great rising of Iranian society against the rule of the Shah in which Khomeini’s Islamist faction ends up taking power. Written in a simple direct style, Rahmaninejad’s memoir describes his fraught creative life in Tehran during these decades, founding a theater company and directing plays under the increasing pressure of the censorship authorities and the Shah’s secret police. After being arrested and tortured by the SAVAK and after spending years in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison and being a cause célèbre of Amnesty International, Rahmaninejad is freed by the Revolution of 1979. But his new-found freedom is short-lived; the progressive intellectuals and artists find themselves overpowered and outmaneuvered by the better organized Islamists, leading to renewed terror and to exile. In Western perception, the Iranian Revolution, which this year has its 40th anniversary, often overshadows the decades of Iran’s modern history that preceded it. A Man of the Theater fills this gap. The title derives from a time of torture in prison when interrogators ordered him to write everything about his activities. To avoid revealing anything incriminating he took pen in hand and wrote and wrote about all his artistic passions, beginning, "Here it is—this is my life! I am an artist! A man of the theater!"Trade Review"This is the story of a visionary auteur and insightful interpreter of theater, who was rewarded by both the Shah and the Ayatollah with prison sentences . . . where he proceeded to stage plays with his fellow inmates. Nasser’s tale of his art and its encounter with power is told with the poignant humor and devastatingly profound honesty that characterizes his life and his work." -- Syrus Samii, author of The Blue Flower of Forgetfulness

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Book SynopsisThe experiences of a diverse range of progressive theater and performance makers in their own words. Curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges offer insight into the field and point out limitations due to discrimination and unequal opportunity for performance artists in the United States over the past 55 years. In this work, performers, often unknown beyond their immediate audience, articulate diverse influences. They also reflect on how artists are educated and supported, what content is deemed valuable and how it is brought to bear, as well as which audiences are welcome and whether cross-community exchange is encouraged. The book’s voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.

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Book SynopsisSeminal plays and essays reveal the radical origins and approach of Appalachia’s Roadside Theater This two-volume anthology tells the story of Roadside Theater’s first 45 years and includes nine award-winning original play scripts; ten essays by authors from different disciplines and generations, which explore the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances; and a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam.Trade ReviewArt in a Democracy overflows like water from a well, chronicling a rural working-class theater’s 45-years of crisscrossing the country bridging bitter partisan, racial, and other divisions by dramatizing the tremendous local intelligence and creativity inherent in every community. This collection of plays and commentary represents the cutting edge of a new democratic art. -- Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and WorkRoadside Theater has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music. -- Robert Putnam, author, Bowling AloneThese two volumes are an indispensable gift to our field. These plays, and the insightful essays that accompany them, offer a roadmap to hope, joy, and inspiration. -- Bill Rauch, founding artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts CenterThe impact on Urban Bush Women from our work with Roadside Theater over two decades cannot be overstated. Art in a Democracy unveils the way we can build strong bonds through working, living, and creating art with communities while addressing social inequities. The history embedded in these volumes is priceless. -- Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women; 2021 MacArthur Award Fellow; 2022 Gish Prize recipient

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Book SynopsisSeminal plays and essays reveal the radical origins and approach of Appalachia’s Roadside Theater This two-volume anthology tells the story of Roadside Theater’s first 45 years and includes nine award-winning original play scripts; ten essays by authors from different disciplines and generations, which explore the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances; and a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam.Trade ReviewArt in a Democracy overflows like water from a well, chronicling a rural working-class theater’s 45-years of crisscrossing the country bridging bitter partisan, racial, and other divisions by dramatizing the tremendous local intelligence and creativity inherent in every community. This collection of plays and commentary represents the cutting edge of a new democratic art. -- Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and WorkRoadside Theater has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music. -- Robert Putnam, author, Bowling AloneThese two volumes are an indispensable gift to our field. These plays, and the insightful essays that accompany them, offer a roadmap to hope, joy, and inspiration. -- Bill Rauch, founding artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts CenterThe impact on Urban Bush Women from our work with Roadside Theater over two decades cannot be overstated. Art in a Democracy unveils the way we can build strong bonds through working, living, and creating art with communities while addressing social inequities. The history embedded in these volumes is priceless. -- Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women; 2021 MacArthur Award Fellow; 2022 Gish Prize recipient

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Book SynopsisCollaborative plays with diverse ensembles across the country address pressing issues of our times The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of recently-built prisons. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like. The anthology raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?Trade ReviewArt in a Democracy overflows like water from a well, chronicling a rural working-class theater’s 45-years of crisscrossing the country bridging bitter partisan, racial, and other divisions by dramatizing the tremendous local intelligence and creativity inherent in every community. This collection of plays and commentary represents the cutting edge of a new democratic art. -- Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and WorkRoadside Theater has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music. -- Robert Putnam, author, Bowling AloneThese two volumes are an indispensable gift to our field. These plays, and the insightful essays that accompany them, offer a roadmap to hope, joy, and inspiration. -- Bill Rauch, founding artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts CenterThe impact on Urban Bush Women from our work with Roadside Theater over two decades cannot be overstated. Art in a Democracy unveils the way we can build strong bonds through working, living, and creating art with communities while addressing social inequities. The history embedded in these volumes is priceless. -- Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women; 2021 MacArthur Award Fellow; 2022 Gish Prize recipient

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Book SynopsisCollaborative plays with diverse ensembles across the country address pressing issues of our times The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of recently-built prisons. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like. The anthology raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?Trade ReviewArt in a Democracy overflows like water from a well, chronicling a rural working-class theater’s 45-years of crisscrossing the country bridging bitter partisan, racial, and other divisions by dramatizing the tremendous local intelligence and creativity inherent in every community. This collection of plays and commentary represents the cutting edge of a new democratic art. -- Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and WorkRoadside Theater has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music. -- Robert Putnam, author, Bowling AloneThese two volumes are an indispensable gift to our field. These plays, and the insightful essays that accompany them, offer a roadmap to hope, joy, and inspiration. -- Bill Rauch, founding artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts CenterThe impact on Urban Bush Women from our work with Roadside Theater over two decades cannot be overstated. Art in a Democracy unveils the way we can build strong bonds through working, living, and creating art with communities while addressing social inequities. The history embedded in these volumes is priceless. -- Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women; 2021 MacArthur Award Fellow; 2022 Gish Prize recipient

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Book SynopsisThis two-volume anthology tells the story of Roadside Theater’s first 45 years and includes nine award-winning original play scripts; ten essays by authors from different disciplines and generations, which explore the plays’ social, economic, and political circumstances; and a critical recounting of the theater’s history from 1975 through 2020. The plays in Volume 1 offer a people’s history of the Appalachian coalfields, from the European incursion through the American War in Vietnam. The plays in Volume 2 come from Roadside’s intercultural and issue-specific theater work, including long-term collaborations with the African American Junebug Productions in New Orleans and the Puerto Rican Pregones Theater in the South Bronx, as well as with residents on both sides of the walls of recently-built prisons. Roadside has spent 45 years searching for what art in a democracy might look like. The anthology raises questions such as, What are common principles and common barriers to achieving democracy across disciplines, and how can the disciplines unite in common democratic cause?Trade Review"Art in a Democracy overflows like water from a well, chronicling a rural working-class theater’s 45-years of crisscrossing the country bridging bitter partisan, racial, and other divisions by dramatizing the tremendous local intelligence and creativity inherent in every community. This collection of plays and commentary represents the cutting edge of a new democratic art." -- Harry Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy, Institute for Public Life and Work"Roadside Theater has mustered diverse local folks in declining towns in Appalachia to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music." -- Robert Putnam, author, Bowling Alone"These two volumes are an indispensable gift to our field. These plays, and the insightful essays that accompany them, offer a roadmap to hope, joy, and inspiration." -- Bill Rauch, founding artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts Center"The impact on Urban Bush Women from our work with Roadside Theater over two decades cannot be overstated. Art in a Democracy unveils the way we can build strong bonds through working, living, and creating art with communities while addressing social inequities. The history embedded in these volumes is priceless." -- Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Founding Artistic Director, Urban Bush Women; 2021 MacArthur Award Fellow; 2022 Gish Prize recipient

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Book SynopsisThe Encyclopedia of Vaudeville provides a unique record of what was once America's preeminent form of popular entertainment from the late 1800s through the early 1930s. It includes entries not only on the entertainers themselves, but also on those who worked behind the scenes, the theatres, genres, and historical terms. Entries on individual vaudevillians include biographical information, samplings of routines and, often, commentary by the performers. Many former vaudevillians were interviewed for the book, including Milton Berle, Block and Sully, Kitty Doner, Fifi D'Orsay, Nick Lucas, Ken Murray, Fayard Nicholas, Olga Petrova, Rose Marie, Arthur Tracy, and Rudy Vallee. Where appropriate, entries also include bibliographies. The volume concludes with a guide to vaudeville resources and a general bibliography.Aside from its reference value, with its more than five hundred entries, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville discusses the careers of the famous and the forgotten. Many of the vaudevillians here, including Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jimmy Durante, W. C. Fields, Bert Lahr, and Mae West, are familiar names today, thanks to their continuing careers on screen. At the same time, and given equal coverage, are forgotten acts: legendary female impersonators Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, the vulgar Eva Tanguay with her billing as ""The I Don't Care Girl,"" male impersonator Kitty Doner, and a host of ""freak"" acts.

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Book SynopsisUncovers the central role of Brecht reception in Turkish theater and Turkish-German literature, examining interactions between Turkish and German writers, texts, and contexts. Bertolt Brecht died in 1956, but his theory and practice has continued to shape debates about the politics of culture - not only in Germany, but in Turkey as well, where a new generation of intellectuals emerged during a period ofliberalization in the 1960s and sought to link culture to politics, art to life, theater to revolutionary practice. Ever since, Brecht has connected two cultures that have become ever more intertwined. Drawing upon archival research and close textual analysis, this study reconstructs how Brecht's thought was first interpreted by theater practitioners in Turkey and then by Turkish writers living in Germany. Gezen first focuses on Turkey in the 1960s, reconstructing theater programming and critical debates in literary journals in order to explore how Brechtian stage productions thematized issues in Turkish politics and cultural affairs. She then traces the significance of Brechtiantheater practice and aesthetics for Aras Ören (1939-) and Emine Sevgi Özdamar (1946-), two important writers, actors, and dramatists who emigrated to Germany. By shedding light on their theatrical involvement in Turkey and East and West Germany, this study not only introduces a new context for comprehending individual works, but also enhances our understanding of the intellectual interchanges that shaped the emergence of Turkish-German literature. Ela E. Gezen is Associate Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Trade ReviewThis cohesive, well-written, and overdue analysis examines the interconnections and intersections of Brecht's political aesthetics, Turkish theater, and Turkish-German literature . . . [and] is an invaluable asset to Brecht scholars, Ören scholars, Özdamar scholars, and all those working in German studies, theater and performance studies, Turkish-German studies, and especially on relationships and intersections between Turkish and German literature. -- Britta Kallin * FEMINIST GERMAN STUDIES *Gezen's rich and informative book provides deep insights into Turkish-German cultural history, as seen through the lens of Bertolt Brecht...[A] book that can pave the path for new directions in German Studies and for a more global understanding of Brecht's aesthetics. -- Vera Stegmann * BRECHT YEARBOOK *[T]he broader significance of this book for German studies [is that] by reading the work of Ören and Özdamar in the context of the Turkish Brecht reception and as a continued exchange in the realm of theater, Gezen seeks to shift 'our attention away from thinking about Turkish writers in Germany purely through the lens of labor migration' (106). As the quali?er 'purely' implies, Gezen thereby construes her study not as a rejection or downgrading of previous scholarship but, rightly, as a timely corrective to its dominant trajectory. -- Rob Burns * MONATSHEFTE *[T]his valuable volume manages to do precisely what it sets out to: emphasizing the 'Turkish' in 'Turkish-German' while also painting a more comprehensive picture of Ören and Özdamar within their respective German communities and providing a far more detailed account of the cultural exchange and interchange . . . between Turkey and Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. . . [A]n indispensable volume for anybody researching Turkish-German theater or literature in this period. * STUDIES IN 20TH- and 21ST-CENTURY LITERATURE *[A]n original, comprehensive, inclusive, and engaging contribution. . . . By drawing on original archival research and convincing close readings through a Brechtian lens, Gezen offers a whole new framework for transcultural and transnational literary analysis both within German studies and beyond. -- Steffen Kaupp * GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW *[P]ersuasively foregrounds the importance of theatre for our understanding of Turkish-German connections, and the work of Ören and Özdamar in particular. . . . [T]his book will be of interest to scholars and students working on Brecht's reception or on (Turkish-)German theatre and literature, and Gezen's translations and clear outline of Turkish politics make the . . . material under discussion accessible both to the majority of Germanists, who cannot read Turkish, and to English-speakers interested in transnational Theatre Studies. -- Joseph Twist * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *This incisive study demonstrates that just as Turkish-German encounters prove surprisingly key to expanding our grasp of Brechtian theater as practiced and theorized in cold-war Germany, Brechtian theater also proves key to revising our understanding of the aesthetics and history of Turkish-German culture in and beyond Germany. Ela E. Gezen dramatically rewrites the foundational literary history of an era, with stunning consequences for literary analysis today. - -- Leslie A. Adelson, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies, Cornell UniversityGezen's study demonstrates that the theater is a particularly productive lens through which to view Turkish-German (cultural) interchange. -- Paula Hanssen * COLLOQUIA GERMANICA *Table of ContentsIntroduction Intersections of Politics and Aesthetics: Bertolt Brecht in the Turkish Context Didactic Realism: Aras Ören and Working-Class Culture Staged Pasts: Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Dramatic Aesthetic Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisReconstructs the constitutive role that German actresses played on and off the stage in shaping not only modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices, but also influential strains of modern thought. Around 1900, German and Austrian actresses had allure and status, apparent autonomy, and unconventional lifestyles. They presented a complex problem socially and aesthetically, one tied to the so-called Woman Question and to the contested status of modernity. For modernists, the actress's socioeconomic mobility and defiance of gender norms opened space to contest social and moral strictures, and her mutability offered a means to experiment with identity. For conservatives, on the other hand, female performance could support antifeminist convictions and validate masculine authority by positing woman as nothing but a false surface shaped by productive male forces. Influential male-authored texts from the period thereby disavowed female subjectivity per se by equating "woman" and "actress." S. E. Jackson establishes the actress as a key figure in a discursive matrix surrounding modernity, gender, and subjectivity. Her central argument is that because the figure of the actress bridged such varied fields of thought, women who were actresses had a consequential impact that resonated in and far beyond the theater - but has not been explored. Examining archival sources such as theater reviews and writing by actresses in direct relation to canonical aesthetic and philosophical texts, The Problem of the Actress reconstructs the constitutive role that womenplayed on and off the stage in shaping not only modernist theater aesthetics and performance practices, but also influential strains of modern thought.Trade ReviewThis compelling text is written in a clear and accessible style, making it appropriate for use with undergraduate students, yet what is most impressive is its attention to a wide range of genres and its relevance for a wide range of fields. In Jackson's book, there is truly something for everyone. * FEMINIST GERMAN STUDIES *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction The Problem of the Actress Actress as Woman, Woman as Actress Sexy Beasts Writing Actresses Dancing in the Abyss Coda Bibliography Index Index

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Book SynopsisCitizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive about the history of the American imagination but also provide unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.

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Book SynopsisCitizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.Each work included jarring or discordant elements that pointed to a deeper tension between the kind of stories Americans wish to tell about themselves and the historical and social reality of race. Although all three have been widely criticized, their efforts to connect the concepts of nation and race are not only instructive about the history of the American imagination but also provide unexpected resources for contemporary reflection.

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Book SynopsisThroughout the seventeenth century, early modern play readers and playgoers copied dramatic extracts (selections from plays and masques) into their commonplace books, verse miscellanies, diaries, and songbooks. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays is the first to examine these often overlooked texts, which reveal what early modern audiences and readers took, literally and figuratively, from plays. As this under-examined archival evidence shows, play readers and playgoers viewed plays as malleable and modular texts to be altered, appropriated, and, most importantly, used. These records provide information that is not available in other forms about the popularity and importance of early modern plays, the reasons plays appealed to their audiences, and the ideas in plays that most interested audiences. Tracing the course of dramatic extracting from the earliest stages in the 1590s, through the prolific manuscript circulation at the universities, to the closure and reopening of the theatres, Estill gathers these microhistories to create a comprehensive overview of seventeenth-century dramatic extracts and the culture of extracting from plays. Dramatic Extracts in Seventeenth-Century English Manuscripts: Watching, Reading, Changing Plays explores new archival evidence (from John Milton’s signature to unpublished university plays) while also analyzing the popularity of perennial favorites such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The study of dramatic extracts is the study of particulars: particular readers, particular manuscripts, particular plays or masques, particular historic moments. As D. F. McKenzie puts it, “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways.” By providing careful analyses of these rich source texts, this book shows how active play-viewing and play-reading (that is, extracting) ultimately led to changing the plays themselves, both through selecting and manipulating the extracts and positioning the plays in new contexts. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Book SynopsisWomen Warriors in Romantic Drama examines a recurring figure that appears in French, British, and German drama between 1789 and 1830: the woman warrior. The term itself, “woman warrior,” refers to quasi-historical female soldiers or assassins. Women have long contributed to military campaigns as canteen women. Camp followers ranged from local citizenry to spouses and prostitutes, and on occasion, women assisted men in combat. However, the woman warrior is a romantic figure, meaning a fanciful ideal, despite the reality of women’s participation in select scenes of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The central claim of this book is the woman warrior is a way for some women writers (Olympe de Gouges, Christine Westphalen, Karoline von Günderrode, and Mary Robinson) to explore the case for extending citizenship to women. This project focuses primarily on theater for the reason that the stage simulates the public world that female dramatists and their warriors seek to inhabit. Novels and poetry clearly belong to the realm of fiction, but when audiences see women fighting onstage, they confront concrete visions of impossible women. I examine dramas in the context of their performance and production histories in order to answer why so many serious dramas featuring women warriors fail to find applause, or fail to be staged at all. Dramas about women warriors seem to sometimes contribute to the argument for female citizenship when they take the form of tragedy, because the deaths of female protagonists in such plays often provoke consideration about women’s place in society. Consequently, where we find women playing soldiers in various entertainment venues, farce and satire often seem to dominate, although this book points to some exceptions. Censorship and audience demand for comedies made producing tragedies difficult for female playwrights, who battled additional obstacles to fashioning their careers. I compare male (Edmund Eyre, Heinrich von Kleist) and female writers’ dramatizations of the woman warrior. This analysis shows that the difficult project of getting audiences to take women warriors seriously resembles women writers’ struggles to enter the ostensibly male domains of tragedy and the public sphere. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Book SynopsisThe rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.Trade Review"Phillips's most significant contribution is her move to focus on the gravid body and its realities as well as significance(s), something both earlier histories of actresses and cultural histories of maternity have shied away from. The book's dialogues and echoes across and between different case studies – and with our own time – are significant for eighteenth-century, celebrity, and theatre studies." -- Elaine McGirr * editor of Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830 *Table of ContentsFiguresAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 Inheriting Greatness: Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen and Anne Oldfield2 Pregnant Sensibility: Susannah Cibber and George Anne Bellamy3 Conceiving Genius: Sarah Siddons4 Prolific Muse: Dorothy JordanConclusion: Celebrity Pregnancy, Then and NowAppendix: Birth and Christening DatesNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisThis collection centers on the remarkable life and career of the writer and actor Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821), active in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Inspired by the example of Inchbald’s biographer, Annibel Jenkins (1918–2013), the contributors explore the broad historical and cultural context around Inchbald’s life and work, with essays ranging from the Restoration to the nineteenth century. Ranging from visual culture, theater history, literary analyses and to historical investigations, the essays not only present a fuller picture of cultural life in Great Britain in the long eighteenth century, but also reflect a range of disciplinary perspectives. The collection concludes with the final scholarly presentation of the late Professor Jenkins, a study of the eighteenth-century English newspaper The World (1753-1756). Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionDaniel J. Ennis and E. Joe Johnson1 Inchbald for Our TimeMisty G. Anderson2 The Structure of Fable in Inchbald’s Nature and ArtMartha F. Bowden3 Narratives of Emerging Markets and Mercantilist Mappings in Defoe’s LondonMita Choudhury4 Thomas Jefferson’s Sojourn in N.mes: Revolutionary Politics and ArchitectureRobert M. Craig5 “Uncle to All the World”: The Virtual Afterlives of Captain Tobias Shandy, 1831–1948W. B. Gerard6 “My Business Ashore”: Libertine Conduct and Maritime Context in The RoverRanda Graves7 Speaking through the Prophets: Anne Finch, Politics, and ReligionClaudia Thomas Kairoff8 “That Unnatural Mixture”: Nostalgia and Anxiety in Late Restoration TragicomedyCynthia J. Lowenthal9 Speculum Mundi: Caricature and the StageHeather McPherson10 “Hazardous Purchasing Almost Anything”: The Intriguing Relationship of the Wartons, Subscription Lists, and the Eighteenth-Century Book TradeHugh Reid11 After the Great War: The Restoration and Eighteenth Century on the London Stage, 1919–1929John A. Vance12 One of Thomas Bray’s Apostles of Literacy: Thomas BaconCalhoun Winton13 The World of The WorldAnnibel JenkinsAfterword: Dr. Jenkins and Mrs. InchbaldPaula R. BackscheiderHer Worded World: A Tribute to Annibel JenkinsDon RussNotes on ContributorsIndex

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Book SynopsisWho were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today. Table of ContentsNote to the Reader Introduction Chapter One — Negotium Diaboli, Negotium Dei Chapter Two — The Theatre Couple Chapter Three — Giovan Battista Andreini: Texts and Targets (1604) Chapter Four — Virginia Ramponi: Mimesis and Myth (1604) Chapter Five — Virginia Ramponi: Letters and Leadership (1605-1631) Chapter Six — Giovan Battista Andreini: Portraying the Performer (1605-1631) Epilogue Chronology Notes Bibliography

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Book SynopsisWho were the first celebrity couples? How was their success forged? Which forces influenced their self-fashioning and marketing strategies? These questions are at the core of this study, which looks at the birth of a phenomenon, that of the couple in show business, with a focus on the promotional strategies devised by two professional performers: Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) and Virginia Ramponi (1583–ca.1631). This book examines their artistic path – a deliberately crafted and mutually beneficial joint career – and links it to the historical, social, and cultural context of post-Tridentine Italy. Rooted in a broad research field, encompassing theatre history, Italian studies, celebrity studies, gender studies, and performance studies, The Theatre Couple in Early Modern Italy revises the conventional view of the Italian diva, investigates the deployment of Catholic devotion as a marketing tool, and argues for the importance of the couple system in the history of Commedia dell’Arte, a system that continues to shape celebrity today. Table of ContentsNote to the Reader Introduction Chapter One — Negotium Diaboli, Negotium Dei Chapter Two — The Theatre Couple Chapter Three — Giovan Battista Andreini: Texts and Targets (1604) Chapter Four — Virginia Ramponi: Mimesis and Myth (1604) Chapter Five — Virginia Ramponi: Letters and Leadership (1605-1631) Chapter Six — Giovan Battista Andreini: Portraying the Performer (1605-1631) Epilogue Chronology Notes Bibliography

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Book Synopsis Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of Londonidentifies the eighteenth-century comedic stage as a key site of feminist critique, practice, and experimentation. While the history of feminism and comedy is undeniably vexed, by focusing on five women playwrights of the latter half of the eighteenth century--Catherine Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald--this book demonstrates that stage comedy was crucial to these women’s professional success in a male-dominated industry and reveals a unifying thread of feminist critique that connects their works. Though male detractors denied women’s comic ability throughout the era, eighteenth-century women playwrights were on the cutting edge of comedy and their work had important feminist influence that can be traced to today’s stages and screens.

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Book SynopsisLiterary recognition is a technical term for a climactic plot device. Odysseys of Recognition claims that interpersonal recognition is constituted by performance, and brings performance theory into dialogue with poetics, politics, and philosophy. By observing Odysseus figures from Homer to Kleist, Ellwood Wiggins offers an alternative to conventional intellectual histories that situate the invention of the interior self in modernity. Through strategic readings of Aristotle, this elegantly written, innovative study recovers an understanding of interpersonal recognition that has become strange and counterintuitive. Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey offers a model for agency in ethical knowledge that has a lot to teach us today. Early modern and eighteenth-century characters, meanwhile, discover themselves not deep within an impenetrable self, but in the interpersonal space between people in the world. Recognition, Wiggins contends, is the moment in which epistemology and ethics coincide: in which what we know becomes manifest in what we do. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *"This is an intelligent, serious, patient, and innovative work. It is also beautifully written: nimble, unaffected, crystal-clear, and often entertaining." -- Nicholas Rennie * Rutgers University *"Poised between literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the elegant Odysseys of Recognition will be of interest to a broad range of scholars. Scholars of the Goethezeit will find much to contemplate, as will classicists and philosophers." * Goethe Yearbook *"To take Wiggins at his word, the varied recognitions that result from his painstaking analyses are both decisively conclusive and tantalizingly openended. The point is to learn to be amenable to change in all its potentiality— that is, without settling for a substantial conclusion that would preclude further modification. In this way Wiggins’s assiduous brand of literary criticism acquires ethical urgency. As he beautifully formulates it, given the temporal nature of intersubjective, performative relations, any conclusion “is never fully commensurate with or explanatory of the living complexity of another human." * Modern Language Quarterly *"Wiggins’s monograph solicits and breaks ground for further readings in and beyond the texts he addresses. For whether it is a question of the most often cited texts of antiquity, their reinventions in the renaissance, or their adaptations in Weimar Classicism, and romanticism, Wiggins’s interventions will have altered what it means to come to know them." * The German Quarterly *"Ellwood Wiggins has produced a learned and thoughtful study of Aristotelian anagnorisis and its applicability to literary texts from Homer to Kleist." * German Studies Review *Table of Contents Overview of Contents ... viiIllustrations ... viiiAbbreviations ... ixA Note on Translations and Orthography ... xi Introduction: Performing Recognition ... 1 Interiority Illusion Instantaneousness Illusion Recognition as Performance Aims and Scope of Readings Part I. Marking the Limits of Recognition: Between Aristotle and the Odyssey ... 31 1 “Just as the name itself signifies”: Under the Sign of Recognition ... 37 Nostalgia and Recognition Recognitions in Mycenae and Sparta Nostalgic Recognition and Epic Afterness Self-signification and the Nostalgia of Semiotics 2 “Recognition is a change”: Performance in Motion ... 84 Rhapsodic Mimesis and Narration Change in Aristotle’s Physics and Poetics Crying for Show in the Odyssey Recognition in Performance Theory and Moral Philosophy 3 “From ignorance to knowledge”: Penelope’s Poetological Epistemology ... 131 Penelopean Epistemology (Reading Penelope) Penelopean Poetics (Penelope Reading) 4 “Into friendship or enmity”: An Ethics of Authentic Deception ... 164 5 “For those bound for good or bad fortune”: Casualties of Recognition ... 193 Part II. Outing Interiority: Modern Recognitions ... 211 6 Self-Knowledge Between Plato and Shakespeare: Alcibiades and Troilus and Cressida ... 218 Philosophy or Theater? Mirrored Dramatic Structures Mirrored Selves 7 Metamorphoses of Recognition: Goethe’s “Fortunate Event” ... 248 “Glückliches Ereignis” as Anagnorisis Scene Recognizing Action: Visualizing Stories Recognizing Things: Experiencing Ideas Recognizing People: Moving Tableaux 8 Epistemologies of Recognition: Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris and the Spectacle of Catharsis ... 292 Spirals of Intertextual Performance Intertextual Intersubjectivity Intertextual Spectacle The Effects of Tragedy 9 Politics of Recognition: Friends, Enemies, and Goethe’s Iphigenie ... 324 Between Recognition and Acknowledgement The Exception of Friendship The Promise of Politics 10 The Fate of Recognition: Kleist’s Penthesilea ... 361 The Mirrored Gaze Plays within Plays Concluding Reflections: Signifying Silence in Blumenberg and Kafka ... 403Acknowledgements ... 417Bibliography ... 421Index ... 448About the Author ... 449

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Book Synopsis2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Marcie Frank’s study traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel’s narrative form and to the modern organization of literature. Drawing on media theory and focusing on the less-examined narrative contributions of such authors as Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, alongside those of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen, The Novel Stage tells the story of the novel as it was shaped by the stage. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Trade Review“This interesting study explores the ways in which novels borrow from and develop theatrical conventions and forms during the eighteenth century. Examining a spectrum of practices, Frank explores the complex relationships between genre and form and offers new insights into the relationship between eighteenth-century theatre and literature.”— Helen Brooks, author of Actresses, Gender and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women “The Novel Stage is an engaging and provocative text; its major insights about the key role of the repertory in eighteenth-century reading habits and the collaborations between theatre and fiction are bracing and of wide-ranging use.” — Manushug Powell, author of Performing Authorship in Eighteenth-Century English Periodicals "Frank’s emphasis on generic and media fluidity and interrogation of fixed mindsets around them are, to use one of the words she unpacks in Burney’s novels, provocative; I can certainly see why The Novel Stage was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title....Frank’s work is excellent at pointing towards new, interdisciplinary approaches to important discussions of genre and form."— Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature "An important and long-overdue consideration of the relationship between the theater and the novel in the long 18th century, The Novel Stage treats major Restoration and 18th-century dramatic forms—tragicomedy, comedy of manners, and melodrama—as they abandon the stage to take up residence in prose fiction. Essential."— ChoiceTable of ContentsList of Illustrations Preface: The Novel Stage Chapter 1: Genre, Media, and the Theory of the Novel Chapter 2: The Reform of the Rake from Rochester to Inchbald Chapter 3: Performing Reading in Richardson and Fielding Chapter 4: The Promise of Embarrassment: Frances Burney’s Theater of Shame Chapter 5: Melodrama in Inchbald and Austen Coda: The Melodramatic Address Acknowledgements Bibliography

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Book SynopsisWinner of the 2021 Best International Book Award from the Mormon History Association In the late nineteenth century, numerous French plays, novels, cartoons, and works of art focused on Mormons. Unlike American authors who portrayed Mormons as malevolent “others,” however, French dramatists used Mormonism to point out hypocrisy in their own culture. Aren't Mormon women, because of their numbers in a household, more liberated than French women who can't divorce? What is polygamy but another name for multiple mistresses? This new critical edition presents translations of four musical comedies staged or published in France in the late 1800s: Mormons in Paris (1874), Berthelier Meets the Mormons (1875), Japheth’s Twelve Wives (1890), and Stephana’s Jewel (1892). Each is accompanied by a short contextualizing introduction with details about the music, playwrights, and staging. Humorous and largely unknown, these plays use Mormonism to explore and mock changing French mentalities during the Third Republic, lampooning shifting attitudes and evolving laws about marriage, divorce, and gender roles. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.Trade Review"Mormons in Paris is as erudite as it is enchanting. In their introduction, Corry Cropper and Christopher Flood show exceptional depth and breadth of knowledge about French theater, opera, and light opera and their place in late nineteenth-century French culture. The language of the translations is natural and readable, and the little songs in verse are especially delightful." -- Susan McCready * author of Staging France between the World Wars *"This well-introduced collection of little-known musical comedies featuring French characterizations of Mormonism is a welcome contribution to nineteenth-century French cultural studies. The translations themselves are excellent . . . the authors’ choices of idiomatic expressions capture just the right tone, neither anachronistically modern nor too archaic to retain their impact." -- Andrea Goulet * co-editor of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics *Table of Contents List of Illustrations Introduction Chapter 1: Mormons in Paris Louis Leroy and Alfred Delacour Chapter 2: Berthelier Meets the Mormons Chapter 3: Japheth’s Twelve Wives Antony Mars and Maurice Desvallières Chapter 4: Stephana’s Jewel Arthur Bernède and Albert Dubarry Acknowledgements Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisCollecting diverse critical perspectives on the topic of play—from dolls, bilboquets, and lotteries, to writing itself—this volume offers new insights into how play was used to represent and reimagine the world in eighteenth-century France. In documenting various modes of play, contributors theorize its relation to law, religion, politics, and economics. Equally important was the role of “play” in plays, and the function of theatrical performance in mirroring, and often contesting, our place in the universe. These essays remind us that the spirit of play was very much alive during the “Age of Reason,” providing ways for its practitioners to consider more “serious” themes such as free will and determinism, illusions and equivocations, or chance and inequality. Standing at the intersection of multiple intellectual avenues, this is the first comprehensive study in English devoted to the different guises of play in Enlightenment France, certain to interest curious readers across disciplinary backgrounds.Trade Review"Bringing together game studies and 18th-century French studies, Modes of Play in Eighteenth-Century France is a most welcome contribution to the study of French literature, history, and culture. The collection introduces us to understudied works and provides fresh approaches to canonical texts, broadening our understanding of the interaction between play, culture, and politics." -- Tracy Rutler * co-creator of Legacies of the Enlightenment *"An enjoyable and stimulating collection, this volume will be of much interest to students and scholars alike. It will undoubtedly spur new scholarly work on the history of play which, as the editors and contributors so convincingly show, is no trivial matter." -- Gemma Tidman * H-France Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction Fayçal Falaky and Reginald McGinnis 1 Playing with Dolls in Old Regime Fairy Tales Rori Bloom 2 The Morality of Bilboquet, or the Equivocations of Language Jean-Alexandre Perras 3 Fiction as Play: Rhetorical Subversion in Alain-René Lesage’s Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane Zeina Hakim 4 Playthings of Fortune: Lots, Games of Chance, and Inequality in l’Abbé Prévost Masano Yamashita 5 Boundless Play and Infinite Pleasure in the Chevalier de Béthune’s Relation du monde de Mercure Erika Mandarino 6 The Politics of Orientalist Fantasy in French Opera Katharine Hargrave 7 Playing at Theater: Modes of Play in Théâtre de Société Maria Teodora Comsa 8 Between Play and Ritual: Profane Masquerade in the French Revolution Annelle Curulla 9 The Return of Play, or the End of Revolutionary Theater Yann Robert 10 Video Games as Cultural History: Procedural Narrative and the Eighteenth-Century Fair Theater Jeffrey M. Leichman Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisSpanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain’s classical theater. In this rich and informative study, Javier Lorenzo investigates the symbolic use of space in Lope’s drama and its function as an ideological tool to promote an imagined Spanish national past. In specific plays, this book argues, historical landscapes and settings were used to foretell and legitimize the imperial present in Hapsburg Spain, allowing audiences to visualize and plot, as on a map, the country’s expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries. By focusing on connections among space, drama, and empire, this book makes an important contribution to the study of literature and imperialism in early modern Spain and equally to our understanding of the role and political significance of spatiality in Siglo de Oro comedia.Trade Review“A fascinating and original study of space showing how theater has the unique potential to function as the ultimate vehicle to explore and, more importantly, complicate matters of our past.”— Esther Fernández, author of To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain “Lorenzo offers a wealth of insights to better understand a corpus of plays that Lope de Vega devised from the heights of artistic sophistication and popular acclaim. Lorenzo’s vivid, clear analysis retraces Lope’s steps as he reworks chronicles, myths, and maps depicting Iberia’s patchwork medieval realms for his own times, with a keen eye and well-tuned ear on the imperatives of Spain’s diverse, far-flung empire. Space, Drama, and Empire is a boon for scholars and students alike.”— Elizabeth Wright, author of The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain “An eye-opening examination of Golden Age theater focusing on how Lope de Vegas’s plays use symbolic and ideological space, prefigure an imperial present (and future), and legitimize imperial expansion and territorial appropriation.”— Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, author of Lope: El verso y la vida “Lorenzo’s analysis of the representation of geographical space in Lope’s historical dramas provides compelling new insights concerning the reconfiguration of iconic episodes from Spain’s medieval past as imperial or proto-imperial episodes. Of particular interest is the way that Lorenzo identifies absolutist and imperialist undertones in plays that feature the peripheral provincial settings of Galicia, Asturias, and Las Canarias as prefigurations of early modern colonialism.”— Barbara Simerka, author of Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations A Note on Translations Introduction Space and the Imperial Appropriation of the Past in the Lopian comedia “Que los reyes nunca están lejos”: Empire and Metatheatricality in El mejor alcalde, el rey Born to Expand: Space, Figura, and Empire in Las famosas asturianas Endangered from Within: Space and Difference in Las paces de los reyesy judía de Toledo Atlantic Conquests, Transatlantic Echoes: Space, Gender, and Dietetics in Los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisSpanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562–1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain’s classical theater. In this rich and informative study, Javier Lorenzo investigates the symbolic use of space in Lope’s drama and its function as an ideological tool to promote an imagined Spanish national past. In specific plays, this book argues, historical landscapes and settings were used to foretell and legitimize the imperial present in Hapsburg Spain, allowing audiences to visualize and plot, as on a map, the country’s expansionist trajectory throughout the centuries. By focusing on connections among space, drama, and empire, this book makes an important contribution to the study of literature and imperialism in early modern Spain and equally to our understanding of the role and political significance of spatiality in Siglo de Oro comedia.Trade Review“A fascinating and original study of space showing how theater has the unique potential to function as the ultimate vehicle to explore and, more importantly, complicate matters of our past.”— Esther Fernández, author of To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain “Lorenzo offers a wealth of insights to better understand a corpus of plays that Lope de Vega devised from the heights of artistic sophistication and popular acclaim. Lorenzo’s vivid, clear analysis retraces Lope’s steps as he reworks chronicles, myths, and maps depicting Iberia’s patchwork medieval realms for his own times, with a keen eye and well-tuned ear on the imperatives of Spain’s diverse, far-flung empire. Space, Drama, and Empire is a boon for scholars and students alike.”— Elizabeth Wright, author of The Epic of Juan Latino: Dilemmas of Race and Religion in Renaissance Spain “An eye-opening examination of Golden Age theater focusing on how Lope de Vegas’s plays use symbolic and ideological space, prefigure an imperial present (and future), and legitimize imperial expansion and territorial appropriation.”— Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, author of Lope: El verso y la vida “Lorenzo’s analysis of the representation of geographical space in Lope’s historical dramas provides compelling new insights concerning the reconfiguration of iconic episodes from Spain’s medieval past as imperial or proto-imperial episodes. Of particular interest is the way that Lorenzo identifies absolutist and imperialist undertones in plays that feature the peripheral provincial settings of Galicia, Asturias, and Las Canarias as prefigurations of early modern colonialism.”— Barbara Simerka, author of Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish LiteratureTable of ContentsList of Illustrations A Note on Translations Introduction Space and the Imperial Appropriation of the Past in the Lopian comedia “Que los reyes nunca están lejos”: Empire and Metatheatricality in El mejor alcalde, el rey Born to Expand: Space, Figura, and Empire in Las famosas asturianas Endangered from Within: Space and Difference in Las paces de los reyesy judía de Toledo Atlantic Conquests, Transatlantic Echoes: Space, Gender, and Dietetics in Los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria Conclusion Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender awarded this work the Prize for the Best Translated Edition of a Work on Women and Gender, 2018.Valerie Hegstrom and Catherine Larson have created an annotated new edition and first-ever translation of ngela de Azevedo’s vibrant comedy, El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead, to promote the recuperation of early modern plays authored by women. The book contains a comprehensive introduction that describes Spanish theater in its Golden Age, what is known of the author’s life and times, contemporary stagings, and an extensive analysis of the text.Although the playwright penned her work in Spanish, the Portuguese Azevedo set the action in Lisbon, creating in the process an abundance of multicultural allusions that enrich the text’s baroque quality. The story unfolds as a cross between a jilted-lover scenario and a whodunit murder mystery. A woman laments her departed lover, a sister cross-dresses to avenge her murdered brother, a man duels with his cousin over lost honor, and before long, the dead man turns up as a ghost, or a bar maid, or a female peddler. Questions about identity abound in the witty El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead. The transnational nature of this clever comedy complicates meanings, often producing bilingual wordplay that underscores the self-conscious, gender-bending, ludic character of the play and of theater in general. Azevedo highlights her ability to cross linguistic and geographic borders in the early modern period, as she simultaneously works within and offers a challenge to the dominant tradition of the Spanish Comedia.Trade Review'This side-by-side Spanish–English edition of the play will allow scholars, students, and actors to approach Azevedo’s work afresh. For many, it will be the first opportunity to read this relatively unknown author’s work. This accessible, accomplished edition of El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead should help Azevedo’s play become better known both on page and on stage. Hegstrom and Larson are to be congratulated for making this significant contribution both to the scholarship on early modern women and to the corpus of highly skilled translations of early modern women’s work.' Lisa Vollendorf, Bulletin of the Comediantes‘There is a very small subset of translators who are able to produce compelling verse translations of comedias and an even smaller one whose verse translations are manageable for university theater students. This edition offers a highly readable — and I believe stage-worthy — prose translation that transmits the content accurately and also captures much of the early modern delight with dazzling verbal gymnastics.’ Barbara Simerka, Queens College, City University of New York, Early Modern Women Journal ‘Hegstrom and Larson have done a superb job bringing Azevedo’s play to life, and scholars, students, directors, actors and lovers of Golden Age comedia can now enjoy a play and playwright, neither of which will ever again fall into oblivion.’ Nieves Romero-Díaz, Mount Holyoke College, Seventeenth-Century News

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Book SynopsisThe Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender awarded this work the Prize for the Best Translated Edition of a Work on Women and Gender, 2018.Valerie Hegstrom and Catherine Larson have created an annotated new edition and first-ever translation of ngela de Azevedo’s vibrant comedy, El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead, to promote the recuperation of early modern plays authored by women. The book contains a comprehensive introduction that describes Spanish theater in its Golden Age, what is known of the author’s life and times, contemporary stagings, and an extensive analysis of the text.Although the playwright penned her work in Spanish, the Portuguese Azevedo set the action in Lisbon, creating in the process an abundance of multicultural allusions that enrich the text’s baroque quality. The story unfolds as a cross between a jilted-lover scenario and a whodunit murder mystery. A woman laments her departed lover, a sister cross-dresses to avenge her murdered brother, a man duels with his cousin over lost honor, and before long, the dead man turns up as a ghost, or a bar maid, or a female peddler. Questions about identity abound in the witty El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead. The transnational nature of this clever comedy complicates meanings, often producing bilingual wordplay that underscores the self-conscious, gender-bending, ludic character of the play and of theater in general. Azevedo highlights her ability to cross linguistic and geographic borders in the early modern period, as she simultaneously works within and offers a challenge to the dominant tradition of the Spanish Comedia.Trade Review'This side-by-side Spanish–English edition of the play will allow scholars, students, and actors to approach Azevedo’s work afresh. For many, it will be the first opportunity to read this relatively unknown author’s work. This accessible, accomplished edition of El muerto disimulado / Presumed Dead should help Azevedo’s play become better known both on page and on stage. Hegstrom and Larson are to be congratulated for making this significant contribution both to the scholarship on early modern women and to the corpus of highly skilled translations of early modern women’s work.' Lisa Vollendorf, Bulletin of the Comediantes‘There is a very small subset of translators who are able to produce compelling verse translations of comedias and an even smaller one whose verse translations are manageable for university theater students. This edition offers a highly readable — and I believe stage-worthy — prose translation that transmits the content accurately and also captures much of the early modern delight with dazzling verbal gymnastics.’ Barbara Simerka, Queens College, City University of New York, Early Modern Women Journal ‘Hegstrom and Larson have done a superb job bringing Azevedo’s play to life, and scholars, students, directors, actors and lovers of Golden Age comedia can now enjoy a play and playwright, neither of which will ever again fall into oblivion.’ Nieves Romero-Díaz, Mount Holyoke College, Seventeenth-Century News

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Book SynopsisThis collection of essays addresses a very broad range of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s most significant works, examining them through the lens of “transgression.” Transgression bears relevance to Hoffmann’s life and professions in three ways. First, his official career path was that of jurisprudence; he was active as a lawyer, a judge and eventually as one of the most important magistrates in Berlin. Second, his personal life was marked by numerous conflicts with political and social authorities. Seemingly no matter where he went, he experienced much chaos, grief and impoverishment in leading his always precarious existence. Third, his works explore characters and concepts beyond the boundaries of what was considered aesthetically acceptable. “Normal” bourgeois existence was often juxtaposed to the lives of criminals, sinners, and other deviants, both within the spaces of the known world as well as in supernatural realms. He, perhaps more than any other author of the German Romantic movement, regularly portrayed the dark side of existence in his works, including unconscious psychological phenomena, nightmares, somnambulism, vampirism, mesmerism, Doppelgänger, and other forms of transgressive behavior. It is the intention of this volume to provide a new look at Hoffmann’s very diverse body of work from numerous perspectives, stimulating interest in Hoffmann in English language audiences.Trade ReviewReviews'This new resource is both enjoyable and thoroughly thought-provoking—and so is well worth consultation by faculty and students.'Seán Williams, European Romantic Review'Transgressive Romanticism engages its central spatial metaphor to make Hoffmann’s complex potential as a protorealist clear: expertly attuned to the forms of life and literature with which he was familiar, while always ready to subvert and think beyond them.'Polly Dickson, German Studies ReviewTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction --- Christopher R. Clason, Oakland UniversityI. Transgression and Institutions1. “A poor, imprisoned animal.” Persons, Property, and the Unnatural Nature of the Law in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Das Majorat.” --- Alexander Schlutz, John Jay College and CUNY Graduate Center2. Vergiftete Gaben: Violating the Laws of Hospitality in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Das Fräulein von Scuderi” --- Peter Erickson, Colorado State University 3. Transgressive Science in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fantastic Tales --- Paola Mayer, University of GuelphII. Transgression and the Arts4. E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Bamberg Theater --- Frederick Burwick, University of California, Los Angeles5. Transitions and Slippages of Mimesis in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der goldene Topf,” “Die Fermate,” and “Das öde Haus.” --- Beate Allert, Purdue University6. Transgressions: On the (De-)Figuration of the Vampire in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Vampyrism" --- Nicole Sütterlin, Harvard UniversityIII. Transgression in the Märchen 7. Transgressive Play and Uncanny Toys in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Das fremde Kind” --- Christina Weiler, Purdue University8. Attending to the Everyday: Idiosyncrasy in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Golden Pot” --- Ruth Kellar, University of Wisconsin, Madison9. Prinzessin Brambilla: The Aesthetic between Public and Private --- Howard Pollack-Millgate, DePauw UniversityIV. Transgression of Reception in Kater Murr10. Hoffmann’s “Two Worlds” and the Problem of Life-Writing --- Julian Knox, Georgia College11. “Real Humor Cannot Be Captured in a Novel”: Kierkegaard Reading E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr --- James Rasmussen, United States Air Force AcademyWorks CitedIndex

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Book SynopsisIn the middle years of the sixteenth century, English drama witnessed the emergence of the ‘tyrant by entrie’ or the usurper, who supplanted earlier ‘tyrant by the administration’ as the main antihero of political drama. This usurper or, in Machiavellian terms principe nuove, was the prince without dynastic claims who creates his sovereignty by dint of his own ‘virtù’ and through an act of ‘lawmaking’ violence. Early Tudor morality plays were exclusively concerned with the legitimate monarch who becomes a tyrant; in the political drama of the first half of the sixteenth century, we do not encounter a single instance of usurpation among the texts that are still available to us. In contrast, the historical and tragic plays of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods teem with illegitimate monarchs. Almost all of Shakespeare’s history plays, at least four of his ten tragedies, and even a few of his comedies feature usurpation or potential usurpation of sovereign power as a crucial plot device. Why and how does usurpation emerge as a preoccupation in English theatre? What are the political, historical, legal, and dramaturgical transformations that influence and are influenced by this moment of emergence? As the first book-length study devoted exclusively to the study of usurpation and tyranny in sixteenth-century drama and politics, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence will challenge existing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these critical questions.Trade ReviewReviews'Original scholarship of significant value to the academic study of the intersections between drama and politics in the early modern period; its strengths lie in its wide coverage of dramatic texts, from political moralities to Senecan tragedies, and from university dramas to histories of the commercial stage; its combination of these dramatic texts with the analysis of a variety of political materials; and its dual focus on the historical and political contexts of both England and Scotland.'Dr Clare Egan, Lancaster University'[A] perceptive study... [Majumder] examines a span of English and Scottish works, from John Skelton’s Magnificence, through David Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis and George Buchanan’s literary and polemical work, to the Richard III plays of the late 1500s, identifying a crucial shift in the ways in which tyranny and its relationship to usurpation were represented.'Lucy Munro, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900Doyeeta Majumder [provides] a refreshing approach to what has become one of the most discussed topics in Shakespearean studies—that of the expression and negotiation of authority on the stage. [...] It is the final chapter that offers a truly original approach to the issues of tyranny and usurpation in its consideration of three versions of Richard III. [...] Majumder’s analysis takes into consideration the particular audiences and literary conceits employed in each play and offers nuanced and intelligent readings that expose the constant contestation and fluidity of supreme authority.'Ben Haworth, The Year's Work in English Studies Table of ContentsNote on Spellings and AbbreviationsIntroductionChapter One: The Kingly Vice: The Tyrant in Early Tudor DramaChapter Two: Sovereignty, Counsel, and Consent in Scotland: Ane Satyre of the Thrie EstaitisChapter Three: Artful Construction of the Political Realm: Buchanan and the Legitimacy of ResistanceChapter Four: Gorboduc: Absolutist Decision and the Two Bodies of the KingChapter Five: Tyranny Added to Usurpation: Richardus Tertius, The True Tragedy, and Richard IIIEpilogueBibliographyIndex

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