Download or read book Uncloseting Drama written by Nick Salvato and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this work modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and others who revived the closet drama, plays written largely for private reading as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.
Download or read book Uncloseting Drama written by Nick Salvato and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this elegant book, modernism is illuminated through little-known but striking works by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others who revived the “closet drama”—plays written largely for private reading—as a means of exploring forbidden sexualities.
Download or read book On the Queerness of Early English Drama written by Tison Pugh and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often viewed as theologically conservative, many theatrical works of late medieval and early Tudor England nevertheless exploited the performative nature of drama to flirt with unsanctioned expressions of desire, allowing queer identities and themes to emerge. Early plays faced vexing challenges in depicting sexuality, but modes of queerness, including queer scopophilia, queer dialogue, queer characters, and queer performances, fractured prevailing restraints. Many of these plays were produced within male homosocial environments, and thus homosociality served as a narrative precondition of their storylines. Building from these foundations, On the Queerness of Early English Drama investigates occluded depictions of sexuality in late medieval and early Tudor dramas. Tison Pugh explores a range of topics, including the unstable genders of the York Corpus Christi Plays, the morally instructive humour of excremental allegory in Mankind, the confused relationship of sodomy and chastity in John Bale’s historical interludes, and the camp artifice and queer carnival of Sir David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Pugh concludes with Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi, pondering the afterlife of medieval drama and its continued utility in probing cultural constructions of gender and sexuality
Download or read book Reading Modern Drama written by Alan Ackerman and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the relationship between dramatic language and its theatrical aspects, Reading Modern Drama provides an accessible entry point for general readers and academics into the world of contemporary theatre scholarship. This collection promotes the use of diverse perspectives and critical methods to explore the common theme of language as well as the continued relevance of modern drama in our lives. Reading Modern Drama offers provocative close readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays, from Hedda Gabler to e.e. cummings' Him. Taken together, these essays enter into an ongoing, fruitful debate about the terms 'modern' and 'drama' and build a much-needed bridge between literary studies and performance studies.
Download or read book Reading Drama in Eighteenth Century France written by Thomas Wynn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-10 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Drama in Eighteenth-Century France is the first book-length study of how plays were read in eighteenth-century France and, relatedly, of closet drama: excessive plays that cannot be performed within the playhouse's confines and which thus appeal to the reader's imagination. This period in France was characterized by 'théâtromanie', a craze that encompassed the page as well as the stage. The book's first part surveys the historical context in which plays were read and offers a theoretical model for understanding this practice. The eighteenth-century closet was valued as a privileged site of reading. Although scholars routinely present this room as a place of calm reflection, Thomas Wynn develops a framework (derived in part from queer theory) to argue that it fosters passionate and disruptive pleasures that elude the coercive normativity of the playhouse. To explore the multipositional experience of reading plays in this period, Wynn turns to the journal Mercure de France, whose extensive reviews help us to think about geographies of reading, coercion, and autonomy. The second part examines how dramatists exploited the critical, imaginative, and formal potential of the reading experience. It offers close analysis of several closet plays: comedies depicting the dispute between Jesuits and Jansenists in the 1730s; Hénault's historical drama François II, roi de France (1747); and erotic plays from the end of the period. The study concludes with an account of Rétif de La Bretonne's Le Drame de la vie (1793)—an extreme and arguably unsurpassed example of closet drama. Ultimately, this book shows, closet drama is not failed theatre but rather an indisputable part of the lively, passionate, and combative theatrical culture of eighteenth-century France.
Download or read book The Routledge Anthology of Women s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism written by Catherine Burroughs and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism is the first wide-ranging anthology of theatre theory and dramatic criticism by women writers. Reproducing key primary documents contextualized by short essays, the collection situates women’s writing within, and also reframes the field’s male-defined and male-dominated traditions. Its collection of documents demonstrates women’s consistent and wide-ranging engagement with writing about theatre and performance and offers a more expansive understanding of the forms and locations of such theoretical and critical writing, dealing with materials that often lie outside established production and publication venues. This alternative tradition of theatre writing that emerges allows contemporary readers to form new ways of conceptualizing the field, bringing to the fore a long-neglected, vibrant, intelligent, deeply informed, and expanded canon that generates a new era of scholarship, learning, and artistry. The Routledge Anthology of Women's Theatrical Theory and Dramatic Criticism is an important intervention into the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies, Literary Studies, and Cultural History, while adding new dimensions to Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737 1832 written by Julia Swindells and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 786 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre 1737-1832 provides an essential guide to theatre in Britain between the passing of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 and the Reform Act of 1832 — a period of drama long neglected but now receiving significant scholarly attention. Written by specialists from a range of disciplines, its forty essays both introduce students and scholars to the key texts and contexts of the Georgian theatre and also push the boundaries of the field, asking questions that will animate the study of drama in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for years to come. The Handbook gives equal attention to the range of dramatic forms — not just tragedy and comedy, but the likes of melodrama and pantomime — as they developed and overlapped across the period, and to the occasions, communities, and materialities of theatre production. It includes sections on historiography, the censorship and regulation of drama, theatre and the Romantic canon, women and the stage, and the performance of race and empire. In doing so, the Handbook shows the centrality of theatre to Georgian culture and politics, and paints a picture of a stage defined by generic fluidity and experimentation; by networks of performance that spread far beyond London; by professional women who played pivotal roles in every aspect of production; and by its complex mediation of contemporary attitudes of class, race, and gender.
Download or read book Fifty Key Figures in Queer US Theatre written by Jimmy A. Noriega and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether creating Broadway musicals, experimental dramas, or outrageous comedies, the performers, directors, playwrights, designers, and producers profiled in this collection have contributed to the representation of LGBTQ lives and culture in a variety of theatrical venues, both within the queer community and across the US theatrical landscape. Moving from the era of the Stonewall Riots to today, notable scholars in the field bring a wide variety of queer theatre artists into conversation with each other, exploring connections and differences in race, gender, physical ability, national origin, class, generation, aesthetic modes, and political goals, creating a diverse and inclusive study of 50 years of queer theatre. For readers seeking an introduction to or a deeper understanding of LGBTQ theatre, this volume offers thought-provoking analyses of theatre-makers both celebrated and lesser-known, mainstream and subversive, canonical and new.
Download or read book Real Theatre written by Paul Rae and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on musicals, plays and experimental performances to show what theatre is made of and how we experience it.
Download or read book Cyborg Theatre written by J. Parker-Starbuck and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-04-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book articulates the first theoretical context for a 'cyborg theatre', metaphorically integrating on-stage bodies with the technologized, digitized, or mediatized, to re-imagine subjectivity for a post-human age. It covers a variety of examples, to propose new theoretical tools for understanding performance in our changing world.
Download or read book Modernist Party written by Kate McLoughlin and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading international scholars illuminate the party's significance in Modernism In 12 chapters internationally distinguished scholars explore the party both as a literary device and as a forum for developing modernist creative values, opening up new perspectives on materiality, the everyday and concepts of space, place and time. There are chapters on Conrad and domestic parties, T S Eliot's 'Prufrock', the party vector in Joyce's 'The Dead' and Finnegans Wake, Katherine Mansfield's party stories, Virginia Woolf's idea of a party, the textual parties of Proust, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley and the real-life parties of Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, the black 'after-party' of the Harlem Renaissance and the parties in extremis in D H Lawrence's Women in Love. Like guests at a party, the chapters talk to and argue with each other. They contribute different approaches: formal, historical, thematic, biographical and theoretical. They address gender and sexuality, race, genre, class, sociality and privacy. And they establish critical viewpoints. The party is shown to be the site both of introspection and self-display. It provokes competition, collaboration and violence. It is an occasion of nihilism as well as a model for creative production. Key Features: Develops the concept of space, currently of central concern to Modernist scholars Explores the tensions between Modernism as an aesthetics of intensity and Modernism as a movement of the everyday Adds a new and vital area of research to investigations of Modernism as the product of intellectual and social networks
Download or read book Acts of Poetry written by Heidi R. Bean and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-10-03 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American poets’ theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets’ theater’s key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets’ Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O’Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets’ theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience’s role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth Century Stage written by John Robbins and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage is driven by a central question: why were women playwrights in the Romantic period obsessed with silencing their female characters, pushing them off the stage, and announcing the removal of their own texts to the closet? These playwrights were some of the most well-known and commercially successful writers of their era, but were paradoxically also among its most marginalized figures: they were mocked by largely conservative audiences, suffered intense criticism for placing their works on display before the public eye, and frequently found their plays rejected by theater managers in favor of works by established male playwrights. This book argues that these writers did not simply craft plays that would please the crowd, but that they deftly incorporated the suppressions and subjugations to which they were subject into their works. It demonstrates that within their plays, gaps in discourse and representation contain a productive capacity, denoting spaces of imaginative potential or drawing into focus the conditions by which such silencing and erasure takes place, and argues that the long-standing critical misapprehension of these works stems from precisely these strategies of resistance, which of necessity took non-traditional forms and thus have not been readily recognizable to audiences, then or now.
Download or read book The Lines Between the Lines written by Bess Rowen and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-10-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the purpose of a stage direction? These italicized lines written in between the lines of spoken dialogue tell us a great deal of information about a play's genre, mood, tone, visual setting, cast of characters, and more. Yet generations of actors have been taught to cross these words out as records of previous performances or signs of overly controlling playwrights, while scholars have either treated them as problems to be solved or as silent lines of dialogue. Stage directions can be all of these things, and yet there are examples from over one-hundred years of American playwriting that show that stage directions can also be so much more. The Lines Between the Lines focuses on how playwrights have written stage directions that engage readers, production team members, and scholars in a process of embodied creation in order to determine meaning. Author Bess Rowen calls the products of this method “affective stage directions” because they reach out from the page and affect the bodies of those who encounter them. Affective stage directions do not tell a reader or production team what a given moment looks like, but rather how a moment feels. In this way, these stage directions provide playgrounds for individual readers or production teams to make sense of a given moment in a play based on their own individual cultural experience, geographic location, and identity-markers. Affective stage directions enable us to check our assumptions about what kinds of bodies are represented on stage, allowing for a greater multitude of voices and kinds of embodied identity to make their own interpretations of a play while still following the text exactly. The tools provided in this book are as useful for the theater scholar as they are for the theater audience member, casting director, and actor. Each chapter covers a different function of stage directions (spoken, affective, choreographic, multivalent, impossible) and looks at it through a different practical lens (focusing on actors, directors, designers, dramaturgs, and readers). Every embodied person will have a slightly different understanding of affective stage directions, and it is precisely this diversity that makes these stage directions crucial to understanding theater in our time.
Download or read book Microdramas written by John H. Muse and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores what brevity can teach us about the powers and limits of theater
Download or read book The Unfinished Art of Theater written by Sarah J. Townsend and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-15 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A certain idea of the avant-garde posits the possibility of a total rupture with the past. The Unfinished Art of Theater pulls back on this futuristic impulse by showing how theater became a key site for artists on the semiperiphery of capitalism to reconfigure the role of the aesthetic between 1917 and 1934. The book argues that this “unfinished art”—precisely because of its historic weakness as a representative institution in Mexico and Brazil, where the bourgeois stage had not (yet) coalesced—was at the forefront of struggles to redefine the relationship between art and social change. Drawing on extensive archival research, Sarah J. Townsend reveals the importance of projects and texts that belie the rhetoric of rupture and immediacy associated with the avant-garde: ethnographic operas with ties to the recording industry, populist puppet plays, children’s radio programs about the wonders of technology, a philosophical drama about the birth of a new race, and an antifascist spectacle written for (but never performed at) a theater shut down by the police. Ultimately, the book makes the case that the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism.
Download or read book Performing Queer Modernism written by Penny Farfan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on some of the best-known and most visible stage plays and dance performances of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, Penny Farfan's interdisciplinary study demonstrates that queer performance was integral to and productive of modernism, that queer modernist performance played a key role in the historical emergence of modern sexual identities, and that it anticipated, and was in a sense foundational to, the insights of contemporary queer modernist studies. Chapters on works from Vaslav Nijinsky's Afternoon of a Faun to Noël Coward's Private Lives highlight manifestations of and suggest ways of reading queer modernist performance. Together, these case studies clarify aspects of both the queer and the modernist, and how their co-productive intersection was articulated in and through performance on the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century stage. Performing Queer Modernism thus contributes to an expanded understanding of modernism across a range of performance genres, the central role of performance within modernism more generally, and the integral relation between performance history and the history of sexuality. It also contributes to the ongoing transformation of the field of modernist studies, in which drama and performance remain under-represented, and to revisionist historiographies that approach modernist performance through feminist and queer critical perspectives and interdisciplinary frameworks and that consider how formally innovative as well as more conventional works collectively engaged with modernity, at once reflecting and contributing to historical change in the domains of gender and sexuality.
