This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity. Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include: * ancient Greek theatre * Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière * the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama * the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz * romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy * the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski * the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller. Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.

This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the twentieth century. There are thirteen essays covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, contemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Rame. These essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work and theories of theatre and drama of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe. The essays are all new and have been specially written for the book by leading academics.

This book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance.

This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the twentieth century. There are thirteen essays covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, comtemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Rame. These specially commissioned essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe.

This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.

A compendium of information on all the main events, individuals, political groupings and issues of the 20th century. It provides a guide to current thinking on important historical topics and personalities within the period, and offers a guide to further reading.

This volume of Twentieth-Century Italian Drama covers the period spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to that immediately following World War II, displaying the rich breadth of Italian theater in the modern age, from the comedic legacy carried on by such writers as Eduardo De Filippo to the delicate tragedy of playwrights like Federigo Tozzi.Included are seven full-length plays, five one-act plays, one variety sketch, and three futurist sintesi (sketches). Brief introductions preceding each play contextualize the piece within the various movements in Italian theater, and biographies of the editors and translators appear at the end of the volume. An extensive bibliography offers many suggestions for further reading in English.The playwrights included are Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ettore Petrolini, Raffaele Viviani, Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, Federigo Tozzi, Massimo Bontempelli, Achille Campanile, Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo, and Ugo Betti.