Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Drama

This timely collection addresses the neglected state of scholarship on southern women dramatists by bringing together the latest criticism on some of the most important playwrights of the 20th century.

Coeditors Robert McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige attribute the neglect of southern women playwrights in scholarly criticism to "deep historical prejudices" against drama itself and against women artists in general, especially in the South. Their call for critical awareness is answered by the 15 essays they include in Southern Women Playwrights, considerations of the...

The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights.The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years.Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured.What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the...

A reclusive painter living in exile in Paris, Gao Xingjian found himself instantly famous when he became the first Chinese language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (2000). The author of the novel Soul Mountain, Gao is best known in his native country not as a visual artist or novelist, but as a playwright and theater director. This important yet rarely studied figure is the focus of Sy Ren Quah's rich account appraising his contributions to contemporary Chinese and World Theater over the past two decades.

A playwright himself, Quah provides an in-depth analysis of...

The great noh actor, theorist, and playwright Zeami Motokiyo (ca. 1363-1443) is one of the major figures of world drama. His critical treatises have attracted international attention ever since their publication in the early 1900s. His corpus of work and ideas continues to offer a wealth of insights on issues ranging from the nature of dramatic illusion and audience interest to tactics for composing successful plays to issues of somaticity and bodily training. Shelley Fenno Quinn's impressive interpretive examination of Zeami's treatises addresses all of these areas as it outlines the...