This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics.
By Maria Turri
November 24, 2016
From Aristotle’s theory of tragic katharsis onwards, theorists of the theatre have long engaged with the question of what spectatorship entails. This question has, directly or indirectly, often been extended to the investigation of acting. Acting, Spectating, and the Unconscious approaches the ...
Edited
By Sirkku Aaltonen, Areeg Ibrahim
April 15, 2016
This study of Egyptian theatre and its narrative construction explores the ways representations of Egypt are created of and within theatrical means, from the 19th century to the present day. Essays address the narratives that structure theatrical, textual, and performative representations and the ...
By Jacob Juntunen
February 03, 2016
This book demonstrates the political potential of mainstream theatre in the US at the end of the twentieth century, tracing ideological change over time in the reception of US mainstream plays taking HIV/AIDS as their topic from 1985 to 2000. This is the first study to combine the topics of ...
Edited
By J. Douglas Clayton, Yana Meerzon
July 18, 2015
This book considers the hundred years of re-writes of Anton Chekhov’s work, presenting a wide geographical landscape of Chekhovian influences in drama. The volume examines the elusive quality of Chekhov’s dramatic universe as an intricate mechanism, an engine in which his enigmatic characters exist...
Edited
By Erika Fischer-Lichte, Benjamin Wihstutz
July 18, 2015
From its very beginnings, theatre has been both an art and a public space, shared by actors and spectators. As a result, its entity and history is intimately tied to politics: a politics of inclusion and exclusion, of distributions and placements, of spatial appropriation and utopian concepts. This...
Edited
By Dorothy Chansky, Ann Folino White
June 29, 2015
Putting food and theatre into direct conversation, this volume focuses on how food and theatre have operated for centuries as partners in the performative, symbolic, and literary making of meaning. Through case studies, literary analyses, and performance critiques, contributors examine theatrical ...
By Virginie Magnat
June 25, 2015
As the first examination of women's foremost contributions to Jerzy Grotowski's cross-cultural investigation of performance, this book complements and broadens existing literature by offering a more diverse and inclusive re-assessment of Grotowski's legacy, thereby probing its significance for ...
By Amy Holzapfel
June 09, 2015
Realism in theatre is traditionally defined as a mere seed of modernism, a crude attempt to reproduce an exact copy of reality on stage. Art, Vision & Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama redefines realism as a complex and under-examined form of visual modernism, one that positioned theatre at the ...
Edited
By Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, Adam Zucker
April 24, 2015
This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically ...
Edited
By Matt Omasta, Drew Chappell
March 09, 2015
Play helps define who we are as human beings. However, many of the leisurely/ludic activities people participate in are created and governed by corporate entities with social, political, and business agendas. As such, it is critical that scholars understand and explicate the ideological ...
By Dongshin Chang
February 23, 2015
This book provides a critical study of how China was represented on the historical London stage in selected examples from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century—which corresponds with the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), China’s last monarchy. The examples show that during this ...
By Arnab Bhattacharya, Mala Renganathan
February 06, 2015
This is the first volume to focus specifically on Rabindranath Tagore’s dramatic literature, visiting translations and adaptations of Tagore’s drama, and cross-cultural encounters in his works. As Asia’s first Nobel Laureate, Tagore’s highly original plays occupy a central position in the Indian ...