Read more
The dawn of a new millennium offers an opportunity to reappraise the achievements of contemporary English-language theatre and drama in an increasingly cross-cultural age. New multicultural voices are gaining access to the international English stage, which today more than ever is becoming a crucible of cultures. The many challenging essays gathered in this volume reflect this developing mosaic. Written by prominent theatre scholars from Europe, the United States, Canada, Asia, and Australia, these contributions explore recent drama not only in the United Kingdom and the United States, but also in such countries of the former British Empire as Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Focusing on major Anglophone dramatists of the past few decades, these essays provide a fascinating survey of the myriad ways in which English-language drama in transition transcends traditional aesthetic and cultural boundaries.
List of contents
Contents: Marc Maufort: Contemporary Anglophone Drama as Crucible of Cultures - Timberlake Wertenbaker: Dancing with History - Drew Hayden Taylor: Canoeing the Rivers of Canadian Aboriginal Theatre: The Portages and the Pitfalls - Drew Milne: The Anxiety of Print: Recent Fashions in British Drama - Jozef De Vos: Ravenhill's Wilde Game - Amelia Howe Kritzer: Political Currents in Caryl Churchill's Plays at the Turn of the Millennium - Donna Soto-Morettini: «Disturbing the Spirits of the Past»: The Uncertainty Principle in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen - Maya E. Roth: Im/Migrations, Border-Crossings and «Willful Internationalism» in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Break of Day - Alain Piette: The Flexing of Muscles and Tongues: Thug Rituals and Rhetoric in David Mamet's American Buffalo - Barbara Ozieblo: The Complexities of Intertextuality: Arthur Miller's Broken Glass and Maria Irene Fornes's Fefu and Her Friends - Harry J. Elam, Jr.: The Postmulticultural: A Tale of Mothers and Sons - Eriko Hara: An Untold History: The Challenges of Self-Representation in Asian American Women's Theater - Robert H. Vorlicky: «Imagine All the People»: Hip Hop, Post-multiculturalism, and Solo Performance in the United States - Thierry Dubost: Irish Disconnections with the Former British Empire: Thomas Kilroy's Adaptation of The Seagull - Jerry Wasserman: Where is Here Now?: Living the Border in the New Canadian Drama - Anne Nothof: Humanist Heresies in Modern Canadian Drama - Ric Knowles: «Look. Look again.» Daniel David Moses' Decolonizing Optics - Robert Appleford: «That Almost Present Dream of Tomorrow»: Daniel David Moses' Kyotopolis as Native Canadian Science Fiction/History Play - Robert Nunn: Drew Hayden Taylor's alterNatives: Dishing the Dirt - Alan Filewod: Theatrical Capitalism, Imagined Theatres and the Reclaimed Authenticities of the Spectacular - Valérie Bada: Derek Walcott's The Odyssey: A Post-Colonial «Odd Assay» of the Epic Genre as a Regenerative Source of «Latent Cross-Culturalities» - Erol Acar/Martina Stange: Portrayals of Masculinity/ies in Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel - Geoffrey V. Davis: «The Critical and the Dissident, the Irreverent and the Playful»: Drama in the New South Africa - Marcia Blumberg: Mapping Counter Truths and Reconciliations: Staging Testimony in Contemporary South Africa - Marc Maufort: Jane Harrison's Stolen and the International Postcolonial Context - Tom Burvill: Multicultural Arts, Ethnicised Identities? - Christopher Balme: Pacific Overtures and Asian Encounters: New Zealand Theatre and the Bi-Cultural Paradigm - Helen Gilbert: Embodied Knowledges: Technologies of Representation in a Postcolonial Classroom.
Report
«This comprehensive and commendable publication is not only a useful source of information for research in the field of anglophone drama, but would lend itself to use as a course book.» (Albert-Reiner Glaap, Canadian Literature)
«Marc Maufort and Franca Bellarsi...have edited a superb book that re-conceptualizes notions of theatre and drama in English.» (Janelle Reinelt, Modern Drama)
