Contains alphabetically arranged entries that provide career biographies of fifty German, Austrian, and Swiss-German writers, most of whom had their first significant work published or performed after World War I; each with a list of principal works and a bibliography. Includes a cumulative index.

Death still comes to Everyman, but this study of three twentieth-century German plays shows the harder challenge of living without salvation in an age of war and unprecedented mass destruction. Death comes to everyone, and in the late-medieval morality play of Everyman the familiar skeleton forces the universalized central figure to come to terms with this. Only his inner resources, in the forms of Good Deeds and Knowledge, ensure that he repents and is redeemed. Three important twentieth-century German plays echo Everyman - Toller's Hinkemann, Borchert's The Man Outside, and Frisch's The Arsonists/Firebugs - but the unprecedented scale of killing in the First and Second World Wars changed the view of death, while in the Cold War the nuclear destruction literally of everyone became a possibility. Brian Murdoch traces the heritage of Everyman in the three plays in terms of dramatic effect, changes in the image of Death, and especially the problem of living with existential guilt. Death, now over-fed, still has to be faced, but Everyman has the harder problem of living with the awareness of human wickedness without the possibility of salvation. All three plays have tended to be viewed in their specific historical contexts, but by viewing them less rigidly and as part of a long dramatic tradition, Murdoch shows that all present a message of lasting and universal significance. They pose directly to the theater audience questions not just of how to cope with death, but how to cope with life.

An annotated world theatre bibliography documenting significant theatre materials published world wide since 1945, plus an index to key names throughout the six volumes of the series.

Devoted exclusively to women poets, this volume in the Undergraduate Companion Series presents students with an abundance of important resources necessary for 21st-century literary research. The most authoritative, informative, and useful Web sites and print resources have carefully been selected and compiled in a bibliographic guide to the introductory works of 221 women poets who write in English or have works available in English translation. Representing more than 25 nationalities worldwide, the women included in this volume have each contributed significantly to the genre of poetry. For each author you will find concise lists of the best Web sites and printed sources, including biographies, criticisms, dictionaries, handbooks, indexes, concordances, journals, and bibliographies.

Profiles nearly thirty German playwrights from the period 1889-1918, presenting primary and secondary bibliographies and illustrated biographical essays that chronicle each writer's career in detail.

Together with Bertolt Brecht and Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Zuckmayer (1890-1977) was one of the most popular and significant German dramatists of the twentieth century. His folk play The Merry Vineyard (1925) marked the end of German expressionism; his comedy The Captain of Kopenick (1931), a scathing satire on German militarism, and his drama The Devil's General (1946), about a Nazi general and German resistance, were some of the most frequently performed plays in recent German theater history. During the Third Reich Zuckmayer's works were banned in Germany while their author lived as an exile in the United States, trying to survive as a farmer in Vermont. For that reason, Zuckmayer scholarship was off to a slow start. Wagener demonstrates that it received its main impetus from the United States where the majority of dissertations on Zuckmayer were written. He shows the development of scholarship from reviews to general assessments, from positivistic biographical fact finding to the New Criticism and finally to recent modes of critical assessment, including feminist criticism. Wagener draws particular attention to the role of the Carl Zuckmayer Society in critical discourse about this neglected author.

This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.