History & Criticism

Individually and together, The Five Sedgwicks are among the unsung heroes of early filmmaking in Hollywood. Their work took them from vaudeville to silent film, through the studio era and into the Golden Age of television. By the late 1920s the...

These eight women made remarkable contributions: Laura Keene challenged tradition in 1858 by heading her own dramatic troupe; her career was ruined by Lincoln's assassination. Mrs. John Drew, a star at 7 who toured until she was 76, was the matriarch of...

Imagine four hundred actresses attending a London hotel luncheon in 1908 determined to effect change for women. A resolution emerged that very day to begin the Actresses Franchise League, which produced original suffrage plays, orchestrated mass...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780472075119Author Nicole Hodges PersleyFormat HardbackPage Count 296Imprint The University of Michigan PressPublisher The University of Michigan...

From the earliest Puritan displays of piety and rectitude to the present-day epidemic of staged school massacres, the history of America has been characterized by a dual impulse: to cast public event and character as high drama, and to dismiss theater...

In 2009, theatre artist Aaron Landsman was dragged by a friend to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. At first he was bored, but when a citizen dumped trash in front of the council in order to show how the city needed cleaning up, he was...

Between the world wars, several labor colleges sprouted up across the U.S. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning...

Crump discusses social and historical context, stages, stagecraft, and literary art of Yuan drama and presents complete translations of three plays—a bandit adventure, a melodrama, and a murder mystery.Book InformationISBN 9780892640935Author J...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780891480839Author Jan MrazekFormat HardbackPage Count 392Imprint University of Michigan, Centre for South and Southeast Asian StudiesPublisher The...

The turn of the twentieth century in New York City was characterized by radical transformation as the advent of consumer capitalism confronted established social hierarchies, culture, and conceptions of selfhood. The popular stage existed in a symbiotic...

Occupying the Stage: the Theater of May '68 tells the story of student and worker uprisings in France through the lens of theater history, and the story of French theater through the lens of May '68. Based on detailed archival research and original...

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...

In Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West, author Andrew Gibb argues that the mid-nineteenth-century encounter between Anglos and californios- the Spanish-speaking elites who ruled Mexican California between 1821 and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780802076335Author Neil CarsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 264Imprint University of Toronto PressPublisher University of Toronto PressWeight(grams) 443g

At his 1994 inauguration, South African president Nelson Mandela announced the 'Rainbow Nation, at peace with itself and the world.' This national rainbow notably extended beyond the bounds of racial coexistence and reconciliation to include'sexual...

Scenes from Bourgeois Life proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, as characterized by the cultivation of distance. In author Nicholas Ridout's...

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them...

How do we recapture, or hold on to, the live performances we most love, and the talented artists and performers we most revere? Shakespeare and the Legacy of Loss tells the story of how 18th-century actors, novelists, and artists, key among them David...

Theatrical playing, Hamlet famously averred, holds a mirror up to nature. But unlike the reflections in the mirror, the theater's images are composed of real objects, most notably bodies, that have an independent existence outside the world of...

In Sensational Devotion, Jill Stevenson examines a range of evangelical performances, including contemporary Passion plays, biblical theme parks, Holy Land re-creations, creationist museums, and megachurches, to understand how they serve their...

Leading theater scholars discuss the major developments in their field over the past 50 years. The new field of theater studies changed rapidly in the post - World War II, post-Sputnik expansion of higher education, driven by the expressive urgencies of...

This book offers a revealing look at Arthur Miller's political sensibilities as evidenced in his dramatic works and other writings.For more than five decades critics have acclaimed Arthur Miller as a social dramatist. Jeffrey D. Mason's ""Stone Tower""...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorScholar, critic, and theorist Jill Dolan is Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama at the University of Texas, Austin. She is author of The Feminist Spectator as...

Infinity (Stage) is a highly original study and poetic meditation on the themes of death, memory, identity, and representation in theater, film, and literature. Inspired in part by the death of his father, Spencer Golub's scholarly entertainment employs...

"Greek drama demands a story of origins," writes Karen Bassi in Acting Like Men. Abandoning the search for ritual and native origins of Greek drama, Bassi argues for a more secular and less formalist approach to the emergence of theater in...

This collection by leading theater performers, practitioners, critics, and passionate spectators offers a backstage pass to the personal and creative lives of some of the most important and influential theater artists of the past fifty years: Edward...

Performing Democracy explores aspects of a developing form of performance that works to change social conditions for marginalized groups or to preserve the traditions and cohesion of the community. The book combines critical analysis with field reports...

When theater and related forms of live performance explore the borderlands labeled animal and autism, they both reflect and affect their audiences’ understanding of what it means to be human. Affect, Animals, and Autists maps connections across ...

In the 1970s, Yugoslavia emerged as a dynamic environment forconceptual and performance art. At the same time, it pursued its ownform of political economy of socialist self-management. Alienation Effectsargues that a deep relationship existed between the...

Whether we regard it as the collected inscriptions of an earlier oral tradition or as the divinely authored source text of liturgical ritual, the Bible can be understood as a sacred performance text, a framework for an instructional theater that performs...

Everyone has an animal story-the pet they loved or hated, the wild animal that captured their childhood imagination, the nasty dog at the end of the street, the deer your uncle shot or your neighbour hit while driving. Telling stories about animals is...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780472066773Author Helen GilbertFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint The University of Michigan PressPublisher The University of Michigan Press

The figure of the freak as perceived by the Western gaze has always been a part of the Latin American imaginary, from the letters that Columbus wrote about his encounters with dog-faced people to Shakespeare's Caliban. The freak acquires greater...

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006), author of The Heidi Chronicles, wrote topical, humorous plays addressing relationships among women and their families, taking the temperature of social moments from the 1960s onward to debate women’s rightful...

In 1971, Canada became the first country to adopt an official policy of multiculturalism. ,em>Performing the Intercultural City explores how Toronto - a representative global city in this multicultural country - stages diversity through its many...

Haunted City explores the history of racial impersonation in Philadelphia from the late eighteenth century through the present day. The book focuses on select historical moments, such as the advent of the minstrel show and the ban on blackface makeup in...

Questions about how theater history should be taught have in recent years provoked passionate discussions. Some scholars have argued that the emerging discipline of performance studies should replace theater history altogether. On the other side of the...

""Questions the limits of previous critical approaches to the avant-garde . . . [and] displays a deep sensitivity for the political aesthetics of the Western avant-garde, particularly as those political aesthetics pertain to the institution of...

The turbulent decade of the 60s CE brought Rome to the brink of collapse. It began with Nero's ruthless elimination of Julio-Claudian rivals and ended in his suicide and the civil wars that followed. Suddenly Rome was forced to confront an imperial...

In 1764 the first printing press was established in the French Caribbean colonies, launching the official documentation of operas and plays performed there, and marking the inauguration of the first theatre in the colonies. A rigorous study of pre–French...