Peter Buse illuminates the relationship between modern British drama and contemporary critical and cultural theory. He demonstrates how theory allows fresh insights into familiar drama, pairing well-known plays with classic theory texts. The theoretical text is more than applied to the dramatic text, instead Buse shows how they reflect on each other. Drama + Theory provides not only provides new interpretations of popular plays, but of the theoretical texts as well.

The first volume of this series surveyed the great world dramatists to gather concepts and ideas to apply to the real stage, which is the universe God has made and centered into himself as an actor. This volume describes the actors, the dramatis personae. This is his theological anthropology concerning man, his freedom and destiny in the light of biblical revelation. Von Balthasar is concerned here with the dramatic character of existence as a whole, approaching the topic through a consideration of the various conditions and situations of mankind as a drama that involves both the Creator and his creatures.

The third volume of Theo-Drama is considered the most central book of Fr. von Balthasar's entire theological project. Structrually it is the middle volume of the middle part of his theological trilogy: Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic. More significantly, it contains von Balthasar's synthetic treatment of the central mysteries of the Catholic Faith: Christ, Mary, the Church, man and the Trinity. The various elements of von Balthasar's theological reflection converge here, and here as nowhere else one can find the systematic elaboration of his Christology, Mariology, ecclesiology, anthropology and trinitarian doctrine. It is both a one-volume compendium of this theology and a key to his trilogy and other writings.

Theories of Performance invites students to explore the possibilities of performance for creating, knowing, and staking claims to the world. Each chapter surveys, explains, and illustrates classic, modern, and postmodern theories that answer the questions, "What is performance?" "Why do people perform?" and "How does performance constitute our social and political worlds?" The chapters feature performance as the entry point for understanding texts, drama, culture, social roles, identity, resistance, and technologies.

Now thoroughly updated and revised, this new edition of the highly acclaimed dictionary provides an authoritative and accessible guide to modern ideas in the broad interdisciplinary fields of cultural and critical theory Updated to feature over 40 new entries including pieces on Alain Badiou, Ecocriticism, Comparative Racialization , Ordinary Language Philosophy and Criticism, and Graphic Narrative Includes reflective, broad-ranging articles from leading theorists including Julia Kristeva, Stanley Cavell, and Simon Critchley Features a fully updated bibliography Wide-ranging content makes this an invaluable dictionary for students of a diverse range of disciplines

The Methuen Drama Companion to Performance Art offers a comprehensive guide to the major issues and interdisciplinary debates concerning performance in art contexts that have developed over the last decade. It understands performance art as an institutional, cultural, and economic phenomenon rather than as a label or object. Following the ever-increasing institutionalization and mainstreaming of performance, the book's chapters identify a marked change in the economies and labor practices surrounding performance art, and explore how this development is reflective of capitalist approaches to art and event production. Embracing what we perceive to be the 'oxymoronic status' of performance art-where it is simultaneously precarious and highly profitable-the essays in this book map the myriad gestures and radical possibilities of this extreme contradiction. This Companion adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to present performance art's legacies and its current practices. It brings together specially commissioned essays from leading innovative scholars from a wide range of approaches including art history, visual and performance studies, dance and theatre scholarship in order to provide a comprehensive and multifocal overview of the emerging research trends and methodologies devoted to performance art.

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays-and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre-shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

The present work seeks to bring literary theory in line with the most recent practical turn the humanities are witnessing. When simplified, succinctly presented, and skillfully used in multi-coded interpretation within a semiocritical framework, literary theories become practical exercises in criticism, not only facilitating the interpretation of literature, but also making it more enjoyable and more rewarding. This book is different from its counterparts in the sense that it includes an exceptionally expanded model of the practice of literary theories, and replaces long and theoretical discussions with brief synopses of the examined theories. It relies on less-overused texts for illustration as it compiles and organizes the terms and phrases that are often used by the proponents of the discussed theories. The most influential literary theories that have so far been developed in academia are included: the New Criticism, reader-response criticism, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism, linguistic criticism, cultural materialism, new historicism, postcolonialism, and semiotics. Through eliminating the excesses made in the name of theory, this book will restore the faith of students, teachers, and practitioners in the useful and enduring nature of literary theory for the analysis and appreciation of literature.

In this collection of essays by avant-garde theatre's most creative practitioners--directors, playwrights, performers, and designers--these writings provide direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating playwriting and performance of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

"This chapter offers some historical and conceptual orientation to readers of the Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory. Departing from a brief review of ancient roots and 20th century pioneer works, we elaborate on the state and challenges of contemporary entertainment theory and research. This includes the need to develop a more explicit understanding of interrelationships among similar terms and concepts (e.g., presence and transportation), the need to reflect more explicitly on epistemological foundations of entertaiment theories (e.g., neo-behaviorism), and the need to reach back to past, even historical reasoning in communication that may be just as informative as the consideration of recent theoretical innovations from neigboring fields such as social psychology. Finally, we offer some reflections on programmatic perspectives for future entertainment theory, which should try to harmonize views from the social sciences and critical thinking, span cultural differences in entertainment processes, and keep track of the rapid technological progress of entertainment media"--