Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Drama

The Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Durrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Durrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the...

The book is divided into sections according to genre: comedies, histories, tragedies, romances, and poems. Charney also considers works that may be only partly by Shakespeare: The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles, and A...

In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public...

"Albert Wertheim s study of Fugard s plays is both extremely insightful and beautifully written a book that held my attention from beginning to end. It was a pleasure to read Wertheim succeeds in communicating the greatness of Fugard as a playwright, actor, and director. He also conveys well what Fugard has learned from other plays and dramatists. Thus, he places Fugard s works not so much in a South African context as in a theatrical context. He also illuminates his interpretations with the help of Fugard s manuscripts, previously available only in South Africa. This book is aimed not...

Certain works of Romantic drama--Prometheus Unbound, Cain, The Cenci--have received a good deal of critical attention, by as a whole the genre has been misunderstood and only slightly considered. Alan Richardson redresses a tradition of critical neglect by considering the works of Romantic drama not as failed stage-plays ("closet drama") but as constituting a new, distinctively Romantic genre. In turning from the contemporary stage--which was marked by spectacle, rant, and melodrama--the Romantic poets developed an altogether new kind of drama, one which they...

Burwick examines the debate over illusion from Johnson to Coleridge in England, Diderot to Stendhal in France, and Lessing to A. W. Schlegel in Germany.

Although few critics still define illusion in contrast to reality, the essential distinction is between illusion as perceived reality and as hallucination or delusion. The concept of illusion as debated in contemporary critical theory has been shaped by developments that took place during the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic thought. Burwick provides a commentary on illusion in contemporary criticism, emphasizing the ways in...

This study examines issues in politics and political theory in selected works of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), the major dramatist of the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century in Spain. By analyzing secular dramas (comedias) and religious plays (autos sacramentales), Stephen Rupp demonstrates Calderon's awareness of the ideas and institutions of power in Hapsburg Spain and explores the terms of his intervention in the long debate over the principles of Christian statecraft. Through references to Rivadeneira, Saavedra Fajardo, and Quevedo, Rupp...

Brian Johnston's approach to Ibsen, now well known, is unlike any other. Johnston sees Ibsen's twelve realist plays as a single cyclical work, the "realist" method of which hides a much larger poetic intention than has previously been suspected. He believes that the cycle constitutes one of the major works of the European imagination, comparable in scale to Goethe or Dante. And he has shown Ibsen to be the heir to Romantic and Hegelian art and thought, adapting this heritage to the circumstances of his own day.This work demonstrates how the language and scene, characters and "props," of...

A biographically based study of George Bernard Shaw and his milieu, this book offers a non-laudatory reading of Shaw's economic practices and theories, augments feminist and postcolonial critiques that preoccupy the study of literary history in the 1990s, and provides a long overdue revisionist reading of Shaw for an undergraduate readership. It traces the theatrical and political influences on Shaw from his earliest days in London; tracks his interest in socialism as an activist and author of tracts, novels, and plays emphasizing certain polemical traits; and follows his career as a major...

This book tells the story of producer, actor, and author Oscar Asche, one of the most commercially successful actor/managers in the first half of the 20th century. Though virtually written out of theatre history because of his triumph on the musical comedy stage, he is most frequently remembered today as having had a successful career as an actor and producer of Shakespeare. Asche was an innovator in stage lighting and one of the first to use it as a language of the stage rather than as mere illumination. During World War I, he captured the public imagination and provided audiences with...

With a thirty-year run of award-winning, critically acclaimed, and commercially successful plays, from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) to The Invention of Love (1997), Tom Stoppard is arguably the preeminent playwright in Britain today. His popularity also extends to the United States, where his plays have won three Tony awards and his screenplay for Shakespeare in Love won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

John Fleming offers the first book-length assessment of Stoppard's work in nearly a decade. He takes an...