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"Drama -- 19th century -- History and criticism"
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The Columbia anthology of modern Japanese drama
This anthology is the first to survey the full range of modern Japanese drama and make available Japan's best and most representative twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century works in one volume. It opens with a comprehensive introduction to Meiji-period drama and follows with six chronological sections: \"The Age of Taisho Drama\"; The Tsukiji Little Theater and Its Aftermath\"; \"Wartime and Postwar Drama\"; \"The 1960s and Underground Theater\"; \"The 1980s and Beyond\"; and \"Popular Theater,\" providing a complete history of modern Japanese theater for students, scholars, instructors, and dramatists. The collection features a mix of original and previously published translations of works, among them plays by such writers as Masamune Hakucho (The Couple Next Door), Enchi Fumiko (Restless Night in Late Spring), Morimoto Kaoru (A Woman's Life), Abe Kobo (The Man Who Turned into a Stick), Kara Juro (Two Women), Terayama Shuji (Poison Boy), Noda Hideki (Poems for Sale), and Mishima Yukio (The Sardine Seller's Net of Love). Leading translators include Donald Keene, J. Thomas Rimer, M. Cody Poulton, John K. Gillespie, Mari Boyd, and Brian Powell. Each section features an introduction to the developments and character of the period, notes on the plays' productions, and photographs of their stage performances. The volume complements any study of modern Japanese literature and modern drama in China, Korea, or other Asian or contemporary Western nations.
eBook
Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter
In this study, Gould argues that it was in the imperial capital's theatrical venues that the public was put into contact with the places and peoples of empire. Plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access to the imperial periphery; separated from the action by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. But without narrative direction of the sort found in novels and travelogues, theatregoers were left to their own interpretive devices, making imperial drama both a powerful and yet uncertain site for the transmission of official imperial ideologies. Nineteenth-century playwrights fed the public's interest in Britain's Empire by producing a wide variety of plays set in colonial locales: India, Australia, and-to a lesser extent-Africa. These plays recreated the battles that consolidated Britain's hold on overseas territories, dramatically depicted western humanitarian intervention in indigenous cultural practices, celebrated images of imperial supremacy, and occasionally criticized the sexual and material excesses that accompanied the processes of empire-building. An active participant in the real-world drama of empire, the Victorian theatre produced popular images that reflected, interrogated, and reinforced imperial policy. Indeed, it was largely through plays and spectacles that the British public vicariously encountered the sights and sounds of the distant imperial periphery. Empire as it was seen on stage was empire as it was popularly known: the repetitions of character types, plot scenarios, and thematic concerns helped forge an idea of empire that, though largely imaginary, entertained, informed, and molded the theatre-going British public.
eBook
Death in modern theatre : stages of mortality
Death in modern theatre offers a unique account of modern Western theatre, focusing on the ways in which dramatists and theatre-makers have explored historically informed ideas about death and dying in their work. It investigates the opportunities theatre affords to reflect on the end of life in a compelling and socially meaningful fashion.0In a series of interrelated, mostly chronological, micronarratives beginning in the late nineteenth century and ending in the early twenty-first century, this book considers how and why death and dying are represented at certain historical moments using dramaturgy and aesthetics that challenge audiences' conceptions, sensibilities, and sense-making faculties. It includes a mix of well-known and lesser-known plays from an international range of dramatists and theatre-makers, and offers original interpretations through close reading and performance analysis. --
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The Theatre of Shelley
This is the first full-length study of Shelley’s plays in performance. It offers a rich, meticulously researched history of Shelley’s role as a playwright and dramatist and a reassessment of his \"closet dramas\" as performable pieces of theatre. With chapters on each of Shelley’s dramatic works, the book provides a thorough discussion of the poet’s stagecraft, and analyses performances of his plays from the Georgian period to today. In addition, Mulhallen offers details of the productions Shelley saw in England and Italy, many not identified before, as well as a vivid account of the actors and personalities that constituted the theatrical scene of his time. Her research reveals Shelley as an extraordinarily talented playwright, whose fascination with contemporary theatrical theory and practice seriously challenges the notion that he was a reluctant dramatist. Prof. Stephen Behrendt (Nebraska) has described the book as \"wonderfully convincing\" and \"something wholly new in Shelley studies\", while Prof. Tim Webb (Bristol) describes Mulhallen as having a \"more precisely developed sense of the theatrical possibilities of Shelley's work than almost anybody who has written about Shelley\". The Theatre of Shelley is essential reading for anyone interested in Romanticism, nineteenth-century culture and the history of theatre.
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Living with Lynching
Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 demonstrates that popular lynching plays were mechanisms through which African American communities survived actual and photographic mob violence. Often available in periodicals, lynching plays were read aloud or acted out by black church members, schoolchildren, and families. Koritha Mitchell shows that African Americans performed and read the scripts in community settings to certify to each other that lynching victims were not the isolated brutes that dominant discourses made them out to be. Instead, the play scripts often described victims as honorable heads of households being torn from model domestic units by white violence. _x000B__x000B_In closely analyzing the political and spiritual uses of black theatre during the Progressive Era, Mitchell demonstrates that audiences were shown affective ties in black families, a subject often erased in mainstream images of African Americans. Examining lynching plays as archival texts that embody and reflect broad networks of sociocultural activism and exchange in the lives of black Americans, Mitchell finds that audiences were rehearsing and improvising new ways of enduring in the face of widespread racial terrorism. Images of the black soldier, lawyer, mother, and wife helped readers assure each other that they were upstanding individuals who deserved the right to participate in national culture and politics. These powerful community coping efforts helped African Americans band together and withstand the nation's rejection of them as viable citizens. _x000B__x000B_The Left of Black interview with author Koritha Mitchell begins at 14:00._x000B__x000B__x000B__x000B_An interview with Koritha Mitchell at The Ohio Channel._x000B_
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Staging history : 1780-1840
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, historical subjects became some of the most popular topics for stage dramas of all kinds on both sides of the Atlantic. This collection of essays examines a number of extraordinary theatrical works in order to cast light on their role in shaping a popular interpretation of historical events. The medium of drama ensured that the telling of these histories - the French Revolution and the American War of Independence, for example, or the travels of Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus - were brought to life through words, music and spectacle. The scale of the productions was often ambitious: a water tank with model floating ships was deployed at Sadler's Wells for the staging of the Siege of Gibraltar, and another production on the same theme used live cannons which set fire to the vessels in each performance.0This illustrated volume, researched and written by experts in the field, explores contemporary theatrical documents (playbills, set designs, musical scores) and images (paintings, prints and illustrations) in seeking to explain what counted as history and historical truth for the writers, performers and audiences of these plays. In doing so it debates the peculiar contradictions of staging history and re-examines some spectacular box office hits. 0Exhibition: Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK (06.10.-23.12.2016).
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The Parricide
St Petersburg, Russia, 1866. Nihilist revolutionaries have taken to the streets and the rule of the Tsar is under threat. In a small flat, Fyodor Dostoyevsky grafts out a novel for an unscrupulous publisher; it isn't the novel he wants to write, but he is under contract, so he works. All the time, though, he is haunted by a story from his past--that of a parricide, a young man who kills his father. As the characters in his imagination take shape around him, he finds himself forced to choose between rebellion and repression, authority and chaos, passion and love.
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