Author : Jeanne Marie Colleran
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 20,45 MB
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780472066711
Fresh perspectives on political theater and its essential contribution to contemporary culture. Focused studies of individual plays complement broad-based discussions of the place of theater in a radically democratic society. This consistently challenging collection describes the art of change confronting the actual processes of change. 17 photos.
Author : Claire Sponsler
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 41,58 MB
Release : 1997
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780816629275
Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama. In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses. Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.
Author : Nandi Bhatia
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 31,25 MB
Release : 2010-02-01
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0472024620
Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views drama and performance as central to the practice of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. Nandi Bhatia argues that Indian theater was a significant force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various schemes of political and cultural power through its engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare. Bhatia's attention to local histories within a postcolonial framework places performance in a global and transcultural context. Drawing connections between art and politics, between performance and everyday experience, Bhatia shows how performance often intervened in political debates and even changed the course of politics. One of the first Western studies of Indian theater to link the aesthetics and the politics of that theater, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance combines in-depth archival research with close readings of dramatic texts performed at critical moments in history. Each chapter amplifies its themes against the backdrop of specific social conditions as it examines particular dramatic productions, from The Indigo Mirror to adaptations of Shakespeare plays by Indian theater companies, illustrating the role of theater in bringing nationalist, anticolonial, and gendered struggles into the public sphere. Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.
Author : Martin Esslin
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 482 pages
File Size : 16,99 MB
Release : 2009-04-02
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0307548015
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.
Author : Linda Woodbridge
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : pages
File Size : 27,24 MB
Release : 2010-09-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139493558
Vengeance permeates English Renaissance drama - for example, it crops up in all but two of Shakespeare's plays. This book explores why a supposedly forgiving Christian culture should have relished such bloodthirsty, vengeful plays. A clue lies in the plays' passion for fairness, a preoccupation suggesting widespread resentment of systemic unfairness - legal, economic, political and social. Revengers' precise equivalents - the father of two beheaded sons obliges his enemy to eat her two sons' heads - are vigilante versions of Elizabethan law, where penalties suit the crimes: thieves' hands were cut off, scolds' tongues bridled. The revengers' language of 'paying' hints at the operation of revenge in the service of economic redress. Revenge makes contact with resistance theory, justifying overthrow of tyrants, and some revengers challenge the fundamental inequity of social class. Woodbridge demonstrates how, for all their sensationalism, their macabre comedy and outlandish gore, Renaissance revenge plays do some serious cultural work.
Author : Anne Devereaux Jordan
Publisher : Marshall Cavendish
Page : 88 pages
File Size : 31,11 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 9780761421788
"Describes slavery in the United States from colonial times up to the Civil War"--Provided by publisher.
Author : Val McDermid
Publisher : Grove Atlantic
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 34,97 MB
Release : 2021-06-15
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN : 0802158730
A mysterious illness appears in Scotland while a reporter searches for the truth in this graphic novel by the bestselling author of the Karen Pirie series. The first graphic novel from Britain’s “Queen of Crime” (Scotsman) and gorgeously illustrated by up-and-comer Kathryn Briggs, Resistance is a chilling but incredibly moving and inspiring story of individuals pressed to rise above their station, first to nail down the truth of a looming pandemic, and later to try to fight it. Journalist Zoe Meadows has taken a break from hard-hitting investigative reporting to spend more time with her family, which is how she finds herself doing celebrity Q&As at an outdoor music festival near the Scottish border. She and her friends, who run a food truck, head north, along with 150,000 festivalgoers for a weekend of music and camping. Then, some of the food truck’s customers begin to fall ill, and many point to food poisoning. But when the festival ends and the attendees scatter across England, more people begin to get sick and die. What’s worse, it is spreading fast and baffles doctors, resisting all efforts to contain or cure it. With time running out, Zoe is compelled to fight for the truth, even as she loses that which she holds most dear. Please note this thriller is in graphic novel, or comic book, format. Praise for International #1 Bestselling Author Val McDermid “Fascinating . . . Val McDermid is one of the most skilled of crime writers and she has gone a step beyond killing by writing with crisp authority on the facts that lie behind gruesome events.” —Washington Times on Forensics “McDermid continues to dazzle us with the range and depth of her creative imagination.” —New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky
Author : Siân Adiseshiah
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 48,47 MB
Release : 2020-06-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1527554678
Although now celebrated as a world-leading playwright, Caryl Churchill has received little attention for her socialism, which has been frequently overlooked in favour of emphasising gendered identities and postmodernist themes. Churchill’s Socialism examines eight of Churchill’s plays with reference to socialist theories and political movements. This well-researched and dynamic new book reframes Churchill’s work, positioning her plays within socialist discourses, and producing persuasive political readings of her drama that reflect much more of the political challenge that the plays pose. It additionally explores her uneasy relationship with postmodernism, which presents itself particularly in Churchill’s later plays. The book contains a very helpful chapter on socialist contexts, which outlines some of the key events, debates, and movements during the late 1960s up until the early 2000s. This chapter also offers an incisive critique of the easy acceptance by some socialists of a postmodernist rejection of grand narratives and political agency. An in depth examination of the rarely explored interconnections of utopianism and theatre, forms another chapter, where all eight of Churchill’s plays, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Mad Forest, The Skriker, and Far Away, are introduced. The plays are then discussed in pairs in a further four chapters with reference to communist historiography, the class/gender intersection, the end-of-history thesis, ecocritical challenges and postmodernism.
Author : K E Osborn
Publisher :
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 49,12 MB
Release : 2019-05-26
Category :
ISBN : 9781070322728
Isn't it funny?The way your life can alter in the blink of an eye. My club - constantly under siege by the Italian mafia.My city - in a war lasting two generations caused by our fathers.Yet, in amongst the turmoil, I met her.In a froyo store.This sassy woman who's ready to throw down and defend her friends against my brothers and me. But we aren't the enemies in this story, and little did she know our chance encounter would set us along a different path. This story isn't full of partying and fun - it's chaos, carnage, deception, and lies.War - it's brutal.Can you resist?
Author : Theodora A. Jankowski
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 39,47 MB
Release : 2000-07-04
Category : Drama
ISBN : 9780812235524
Noting that though Christian thought has consistently held virginity to be purer than married life, a virgin woman has always queer been in social terms, Jankowsky (English, Washington State U.) explores the tensions behind the many representations of virgin women in English stage plays from 1590 to about 1670 and how those representations can be considered queer. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
