Download or read book Decadent Plays 1890 1930 written by Adam Alston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poisoned cigars, seductive apparitions, minds and empires in the last of their decline and the most notorious kiss in dramatic history – decadent plays challenged the moral as much as the dramatic imagination of their own day, and continue to probe horizons of taste and the possibilities of stagecraft. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many writers reacted to urban modernity by embracing decadent themes and styles, and dramatists were no exception. Decadence offered these writers a framework for exploring nonconformist identities and beliefs that challenged behavioural norms as much as the desirability of modern progress. Decadent plays were at once behind the times in their celebration of antiquity, and forward-thinking in their staging of themes that have become all the more timely in the 21st century, including queerness, unconventional eroticism, and critiques of empire and industrial progress. Equally, the diversity of decadent drama cannot be pigeon-holed; many of these plays still have the capacity to offend worldviews, and invite us to interrogate present-day conventions and propriety. International in scope and eclectic in content, this edited anthology is an authoritative and accessible introduction to a fast-expanding field of decadent literature. The first publication of its kind to deal with decadent drama, and featuring plays translated into English for the first time, Decadent Plays: 1890 to 1930 breaks new ground by foregrounding decadence as a dramatic sensibility in this most pivotal of periods in the history of modern drama. Featuring canonical and little-known works by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, Lesya Ukrainka, Rachilde, Remy de Gourmont, Jean Lorrain, Leonid Andreyev, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Maurice Maeterlinck, Izumi Kyoka, and Djuna Barnes, this anthology is an essential introduction to decadent drama that will pique the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike.
Download or read book Staging Decadence written by Adam Alston and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-09-07 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is decadence being staged today as a practice, issue, pejorative, and as a site of pleasure? Where might we find it, why might we look for it, and who is decadence for? This book is the first monographic study of decadence in theatre and performance. Adam Alston makes a passionate case for the contemporary relevance of decadence in the thick of a resurgent culture war by focusing on its antithetical relationship to capitalist-led growth, progress, and intensified productivity. He argues that the qualities used to disparage the study and practice of theatre and performance are the very things we should embrace in celebrating their value namely, their spectacular uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and abundant potential for producing forms of creativity that flow away from the ends and excesses of capitalism. Alston covers an eclectic range of examples by Julia Bardsley (UK), Hasard Le Sin (Finland), jaamil olawale kosoko (USA), Toco Nikaido (Japan), Martin O'Brien (UK), Toshiki Okada (Japan), Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca (Spain), Normandy Sherwood (USA), The Uhuruverse (USA), Nia O. Witherspoon (USA), and Wunderbaum (Netherlands). Expect ruminations on monstrous scenographies, catatonic choreographies, turbo-charged freneticism, visions of the apocalypse and what might lie in its wake.
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers written by Mustapha Matura and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-10-16 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Methuen Drama Book of Plays by Black British Writers provides an essential anthology of six of the key plays that have shaped the trajectory of British black theatre from the late-1970s to the present day. In doing so it charts the journey from specialist black theatre companies to the mainstream, including West End success, while providing a cultural and racial barometer for Britain during the last forty years. It opens with Mustapha Matura's 1979 play Welcome Home Jacko which in its depiction of a group of young unemployed West Indians was one of the first to explore issues of youth culture, identity and racial and cultural identification. Jackie Kay's Chiaroscuro examines debates about the politics of black, mixed race and lesbian identities in 1980s Britain, and from the 1990s Winsome Pinnock's Talking in Tongues engages with the politics of feminism to explore issues of black women's identity in Britian and Jamaica. From the first decade of the twenty-first century the three plays include Roy Williams' seminal pub-drama Sing Yer Hearts Out for the Lads, exploring racism and identity against the backdrop of the World Cup; Kwame Kwei-Armah's National Theatre play of 2004, Fix Up, about black cultural history and progress in modern Britain, and finally Bola Agbage's terrific 2007 debut, Gone Too Far!, which examines questions of identity and tensions between Africans and Caribbeans living in Britain. Edited by Lynnette Goddard, this important anthology provides an essential introduction to the last forty years of British black theatre.
Download or read book Literature and the Politics of Post Victorian Decadence written by Kristin Mahoney and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, Kristin Mahoney argues that the early twentieth century was a period in which the specters of the fin de siècle exercised a remarkable draw on the modern cultural imagination and troubled emergent avant-gardistes. These authors and artists refused to assimilate to the aesthetic and political ethos of the era, representing themselves instead as time travelers from the previous century for whom twentieth-century modernity was both baffling and disappointing. However, they did not turn entirely from the modern moment, but rather relied on decadent strategies to participate in conversations concerning the most highly-vexed issues of the period including war, the rise of the Labour Party, the question of women's sexual freedom, and changing conceptions of sexual and gender identities.
Download or read book Decadence and Literature written by Jane Desmarais and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decadence and Literature explains how the concept of decadence developed since Roman times into a major cultural trope with broad explanatory power. No longer just a term of opprobrium for mannered art or immoral behaviour, decadence today describes complex cultural and social responses to modernity in all its forms. From the Roman emperor's indulgence in luxurious excess as both personal vice and political control, to the Enlightenment libertine's rational pursuit of hedonism, to the nineteenth-century dandy's simultaneous delight and distaste with modern urban life, decadence has emerged as a way of taking cultural stock of major social changes. These changes include the role of women in forms of artistic expression and social participation formerly reserved for men, as well as the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ relationships, a development with a direct relationship to decadence. Today, decadence seems more important than ever to an informed understanding of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.
Download or read book The False Servant written by Martin Crimp and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2022-07-07 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you really surprised to discover that a woman might have a mind of her own? When Lélio thinks he can ditch and cash in on the rich woman he has promised to marry, in order to become the husband of an even wealthier 'girl from Paris', he enlists the help of his attractive new friend, the Chevalier. What he doesn't know is that the Chevalier is none other than this same 'girl from Paris' disguised as a man, and that her project is to publicly expose the depths of his sexual cynicism. A self-declared 'modern', Marivaux is a pioneer in the exploration of human feeling, asking in this play not only what do we hide from others, but what are we hiding from ourselves? Martin Crimp's version of Pierre Marivaux's The False Servant received its premiere at the National Theatre, London, in 2004 and was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre, London, in June 2022. 'Marivaux's scepticism, irony and fascination with money and sex make him seem peculiarly modern.' Guardian 'Thrills, chills, and belly laughs - this addictively adult comedy has got the lot.' Daily Telegraph
Download or read book Four Decades of Poetry 1890 1930 written by and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Book of Plays from the Sixties written by Arnold Wesker and published by Methuen Drama. This book was released on 2008 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection contains major works by some of the most important playwrights to emerge during the late fifties and early sixties, many of them collectively labelled "Angry Young Men", most of them associated with the Royal Court Theatre.
Download or read book Modern Drama Plays of the 80s and 90s written by and published by Methuen Drama. This book was released on 2001 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology bringing together some of the most importnat and controvesial plays from the last twenty years.
Download or read book Asian and African Studies written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Decadence written by Richard Gilman and published by Hill & Wang. This book was released on 1980 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Spanish Golden Age Plays written by Lope De Vega and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three classic Spanish plays, made famous by Shakespeare and Webster Two of the most famous and successful playwrights of Spain's Golden Age of playwriting were Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Rojas Zorrilla (1607-48). From their prodigious output, the three plays in this volume, based on similar sources to Shakespeare's and Webster's versions, provide a fascinating comparison with their Jacobean counterparts. Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, in contrast to Webster's play, focuses on the nobility of love, with characters who are complex and appealing. His Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Capulets and Montagues, is a fast-moving mixture of serious and comic, with an ending that will surprise and entertain. Rojas' treatment of Cleopatra, with its rich imagery, emphasises the love theme, held within a knot of jealous relationships. A full introduction by Gwynne Edwards sets the plays in context and provides a thorough study of the individual works.
Download or read book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880 1939 written by James Machin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first study of how ‘weird fiction’ emerged from Victorian supernatural literature, abandoning the more conventional Gothic horrors of the past for the contemporary weird tale. It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan, to shed light on the tensions between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction that continue to this day. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period, including Decadence, paganism, and the occult, and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales. This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird, horror and Gothic fiction, genre studies, Decadence, popular fiction, the occult, and Fin-de-Siècle cultural history.
Download or read book Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre written by Patrick McGuinness and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maurice Maeterlinck has been called the 'prodigal father' of modern theatre. As Rilke put it, he shifted theatre's center of gravity, replacing action with inaction, events with the eventless, and dialogue with an expressive semantics of silence. This study, the first in over a decade, traces the development of Maeterlinck's dramatic vision of extraordinary originality and depth.
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Book of Suffrage Plays written by Naomi Paxton and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology presents eight exciting comic pieces that arose from the the Suffrage Movement. Terrific for performance, it provides a variety of strong female parts, while also offering invaluable sources from the period, bringing history to life.
Download or read book The Methuen Drama Book of Naturalist Plays written by Henrik Ibsen and published by Methuen Drama. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of Naturalist theatre remains a staple and often foundational part of the curriculum at all levels of drama education. This anthology of six of the most commonly studied and revived Naturalist plays from the European repertoire offers a unique compendium that will serve as required reading for drama courses and is ideal for theatre practitioners and fans. The selected plays perfectly reflect the formal and geographical diversity of Naturalist theatre as well as its major philosophical, political and theatrical preoccupations. A critical introduction by Dr Chris Megson contextualises the emergence of Naturalist theatre in the late nineteenth century, identifying its principal aims and methods; provides an analysis of the selected plays, mapping their key preoccupations, and ends by considering Naturalism's enduring legacy and resonance today.
Download or read book Plays from Romania Dramaturgies of Subversion written by Mihaela Panainte and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-23 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion reflects the diversity of dramatic writing exploring the past and present of Romania, and takes stock thirty years after the collapse of communism. In addition to plays originally written in Romanian, the collection includes work by German, Hungarian and Roma authors born and/or working in Romania, and brings together plays written during the communist period and its aftermath. The plays included in the collection, edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly and fully published for the first time in English, demonstrate broad variety in terms of form and content – ranging from family dramas to allegories, and absurdist experiments to modular texts rooted in open dramaturgy – and are the work of both individual playwrights and the results of collective creation. These works share a preoccupation with critically reflecting urgent concerns rooted in Romanian realities, and are notable dramaturgical experiments that push the boundaries of the genre. In addition, these plays also seek novel ways to examine universal experiences of the human condition, such as love, loss, abuse, betrayal, grief, violence, manipulation and despair. This unique anthology celebrates the renewed vitality and variety of writing for the stage after 1990, and endeavours to place Romanian theatre in a forward-looking transnational context. Lowlands ('Niederungen') by Herta Müller, adapted for the stage by Mihaela Panainte (German) This stage adaptation is based on a volume of short stories by Herta Müller written in German in 1982 and focuses on the perspective of a child narrator, by way of a series of episodes that centre on mundane aspects of daily life in a remote village against the backdrop of the oppressive atmosphere of mid-twentieth century Romania. The Spectator Sentenced to Death ('Spectatorul condamnat la moarte') by Matéi Visniec (Romanian) This play is a bitter parody of the Stalinist justice system, which totally disregards the fundamental question whether the accused is actually guilty or not. The Passport ('Kalucsni') by György Dragomán (Hungarian) This play is set pre-1989 in a typical small town in the Transylvanian province of Romania, in which the lives of the various social classes, and the fate of the persecuted and that of those who persecute are closely intertwined. The Man Who Had His Inner Evil Removed ('Omul din care a fost extras raul') by Matéi Visniec (Romanian) This topical play is a sharp reflection on the voluntary servitude in which we place ourselves, often unawares, in conditions of our contemporary consumer culture, and a fierce critique of increasingly dominant tendencies to abandon moral criteria in political life. Stories of the Body (Artemisia, Eva, Lina, Teresa) ('A test történetei') by András Visky (Hungarian) The cycle Stories of the Body comprises four plays based on real life stories as experienced by remarkable women (including Mother Teresa and Italian Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi), and are connected to various cities including Budapest, Cluj/Kolozsvár, Kolkata and Rome, from the 17th to the 21st century. Sexodrom by Giuvlipen Theatre Company (Mihaela Dragan, Antonella Lerca Duda, Nicoleta Ghita, Zita Moldovan, Bety Pisica, Oana Rusu, Raj Alexandru Udrea), based on a concept by Bogdan Georgescu.(Roma) This is a work of collective creation by members of the Roma Theatre company Giuvlipen, aiming to bring to public attention taboo subjects, to enhance the visibility of Roma performers and to experiment with new forms of theatre-making in a Romanian context.
