This book examines a selection of plays from four innovative women playwrights of the first two decades of 21st century Spain. By foregrounding female characters as the subjects and protagonists of their plays, Mar Gómez Glez, Carolina África, Lucía Miranda, and Marta Buchaca reinscribe the stage as a space for the productive exploration of female autonomy and individuation. This book further investigates the use the platform of the theatre and the expressive possibilities therein to portray the realities of gendered oppression and efforts to define subjectivity within a social context where confining patriarchal and dominant cultural conditions place severe strictures on women’s open search and development of selfhood and identity. The diversity of genres deployed in their respective approaches, spanning the subversion of realist conventions, the framework of historical drama, the communal potentialities of forum theatre, and experiential site-specific production, point to important innovations in contemporary stagecraft and performance.

“What the women I write about have in common is that they are all rebels with a cause, and I see myself represented in their mirror,” asserts Alicia Gaspar de Alba. Looking back across a career in which she has written novels, poems, and scholarly works about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, la Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, the murdered women of Juárez, the Salem witches, and Chicana lesbian feminists, Gaspar de Alba realized that what links these historically and socially diverse figures is that they all fall into the category of “bad women,” as defined by their place, culture, and time, and all have been punished as well as remembered for rebelling against the “frames” imposed on them by capitalist patriarchal discourses. In [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman,” Gaspar de Alba revisits and expands several of her published articles and presents three new essays to analyze how specific brown/female bodies have been framed by racial, social, cultural, sexual, national/regional, historical, and religious discourses of identity—as well as how Chicanas can be liberated from these frames. Employing interdisciplinary methodologies of activist scholarship that draw from art, literature, history, politics, popular culture, and feminist theory, she shows how the “bad women” who interest her are transgressive bodies that refuse to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman” and that queer/alter the male-centric and heteronormative history, politics, and consciousness of Chicano/Mexicano culture. By “unframing” these bad women and rewriting their stories within a revolutionary frame, Gaspar de Alba offers her compañeras and fellow luchadoras empowering models of struggle, resistance, and rebirth.

British Marxist Criticism provides selective but extensive annotated bibliographies, introductory essays, and important pieces of work from each of eight British critics who sought to explain literary production according to the principles of Marxism.

Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre studies the representation of gender in four of the most important plays by the leading professional women playwrights of the late Stuart period. Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686) and Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) are first placed in their original theatrical and cultural contexts and then studied through subsequent productions and adaptations extending from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The detailed analysis of these plays is framed by a discussion of the cultural position of the playwrights and the kind of comedy they wrote. The survival of these plays in the repertoire offers an unusual opportunity to examine the theatrical 'double life' of works by early women playwrights. The lengthy production histories of these comedies placed them in dialogue with radically different ideas of appropriate and permissible behavior for both women and men. The resulting productions, alterations, and adaptations included both feminist reinterpretations and recuperations of the plays' challenges to dominant meanings of gender. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of dramatic literature, theatre, and women's studies.

The purpose of this monograph is to analyze Agustín Moreto and Cabaña's dramatic production as one that shows influences of both neoclassical and baroque precepts. Moreto will thus be seen as a transitional playwright, a fact illustrated by the three plays studied. The analysis will further show that Moreto, due to his Neoclassical inclinations, was popular in France, and compared adaptations to the sources. Finally, the monograph will focus on the portrayal of the heroines and its implications for female roles.

Phrases and sentences illustrate the various definitions of more than 90,000 entries in this student dictionary reflecting current American usage.