Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Drama

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In searching for a definitive concept of black theatre, Euba delves deeply into the Yoruba culture and gods, specifically the attributes and ritual of Esu-Elegbara. The resulting vision goes beyond the standard interpretations to place Esu, the fate god, squarely at the center of Yoruba ritual and drama, and by extension, at the center of the black writer's concept of character, actor, and audience as victims of fate and satire.

The first section of the book explores the essence of man in the black world of survival. The second, and main section, seeks to develop a concept of drama in...

Behrman's prolific career as a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter spans a period from the 1920s to the mid-1960s. As a writer for popular performance, he had to contend with commercial influences and with producers and directors involved in the dynamics of the collaborative process. Though eminently successful, his works have not received adequate critical scrutiny. His ouevre probably will never be fully determined because of collaboration, numerous rewrites, and the many unpublished and unproduced plays and scripts.

Author Robert F. Gross here provides an immensely...

Though J. M. Synge is considered a major figure of Irish drama and an important canonical playwright, he is the subject of fewer and fewer books and conference sessions. In this volume, chapters by expert contributors confront the possibility that Synge's reputation may not be standing the test of time. The chapters reaffirm the relevance of Synge's plays to contemporary audiences and readers and invite a reassessment of his apparently declining popularity. Comparisions of Synge's work to that of other authors reinforce the argument in favor of his continuing relevance.

J. M. Synge is...

This book offers a compelling examination of performed adaptations of Stevenson's masterpiece, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Rose investigates how a single text, adapted many times in the past century, can serve to elucidate certain shifts in cultural attitudes. Providing an analysis of the relation between culture and performance, the author argues that Stevenson's adapters have infused the original story with concerns about issues of race, class, gender, and economics.

While the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki secured an American victory in the Pacific and hastened the end of World War II, it also ushered in an era of fear. When the Soviets developed an atomic bomb, the United States ceased to be the world's only nuclear power. Americans feared a nuclear attack by the Soviets, while the British worried about being drawn into a nuclear conflict for which they were utterly unprepared and particularly vulnerable. The threat of nuclear war left a lasting mark on the British and American imagination. Like other creative artists, playwrights began to...

Mythic Patterns in Ibsen's Last Plays was first published in 1970. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Until recently critics have tended to regard Ibsen principally as a social dramatist, one who was concerned primarily with the political, social, and moral questions of his time. Radical though he was in the Victorian era, his ideas, with the passage o time, ceased to be avant garde, and for this reason many critics...

To the Third Empire was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Critical acclaim greeted Brian Johnston's 1975 book on Ibsen's final phase, The Ibsen Cycle. Choice called it "the single most provocative and critically exciting books of Ibsen criticism in decades." Johnston now turns his attention to the early works, using the same thematic premise - that the plays follow a clear progression,...

Renunciation as a Tragic Focus was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Norman J. DeWitt explains, in an introduction to this volume, that these essays are written in terms of a personal humanism.

"Personal humanism," Mr. DeWitt says, "comes from an awareness of a world in which pain is real, and it leads to the traditional virtues of wisdom and justice, terms that are seldom heard in academic...