[PDF] Irony And The Modern Theatre eBook

Author : William Storm
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 42,69 MB
Release : 2011-05-05
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1139499424

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Irony and theatre share intimate kinships, not only regarding dramatic conflict, dialectic or wittiness, but also scenic structure and the verbal or situational ironies that typically mark theatrical speech and action. Yet irony today, in aesthetic, literary and philosophical contexts especially, is often regarded with skepticism - as ungraspable, or elusive to the point of confounding. Countering this tendency, William Storm advocates a wide-angle view of this master trope, exploring the ironic in major works by playwrights including Chekhov, Pirandello and Brecht, and in notable relation to well-known representative characters in drama from Ibsen's Halvard Solness to Stoppard's Septimus Hodge and Wasserstein's Heidi Holland. To the degree that irony is existential, its presence in the theatre relates directly to the circumstances and the expressiveness of the characters on stage. This study investigates how these key figures enact, embody, represent and personify the ironic in myriad situations in the modern and contemporary theatre.

Author : Bert O. States
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 36,17 MB
Release : 2019-06-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501743597

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Professor States provides nothing less than a new theory of the drama based upon the principles of irony and dialectic. Very close in approach to the Continental structuralists, he treats irony, not as a literary device or as an attitude in the mind of the playgoer, but as a means of confronting reality—a way of testing and resolving conflicting ideas. Pointing out the limitations of conventional categories such as comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy, he views drama instead as a vehicle for perceiving and ordering the possibilities of human experience. After setting forth his thesis boldly and persuasively, Professor States explores other mod es such as the epic and the lyric and shows how they interact with the dramatic principle. He manages to cover, in a minimum amount of space, the entire range of dramatic styles and periods, placing special emphasis on playwrights of universal appeal like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw, and Beckett.

Author : Christoph Menke
Publisher :
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 41,38 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231145565

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Tragic Play explores the deep philosophical significance of classic and modern tragedies in order to cast light on the tragic dimensions of contemporary experience. Romanticism, it has often been claimed, brought tragedy to an end, making modernity the age after tragedy. Christoph Menke opposes this modernist prejudice by arguing that tragedy remains alive in the present in the distinctively new form of the playful, ironic, and self-consciously performative. Through close readings of plays by William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Heiner Müller, and Botho Strauss, Menke shows how tragedy re-emerges in modernity as "tragedy of play." In Hamlet, Endgame, Philoktet, and Ithaka, Menke integrates philosophical theory with critical readings to investigate shifting terms of judgment, curse, reversal, misfortune, and violence.

Author : August Wilson
Publisher : Theatre Communications Grou
Page : 54 pages
File Size : 50,75 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781559361873

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August Wilson's radical and provocative call to arms.

Author : Tom Faw Driver
Publisher :
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 30,88 MB
Release : 1980
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN :

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Issue covers ; Romanticism, Vaudeville, Farce, Realism. Playwrights considered ; Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Goethe, Kleist, Pirandello, Brecht and Genet.

Author : Ronda Arab
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 38,84 MB
Release : 2015-05-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317690702

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This collection of original essays honors the groundbreaking scholarship of Jean E. Howard by exploring cultural and economic constructions of affect in the early modern theater. While historicist and materialist inquiry has dominated early modern theater studies in recent years, the historically specific dimensions of affect and emotion remain underexplored. This volume brings together these lines of inquiry for the first time, exploring the critical turn to affect in literary studies from a historicist perspective to demonstrate how the early modern theater showcased the productive interconnections between historical contingencies and affective attachments. Considering well-known plays such as Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday together with understudied texts such as court entertainments, and examining topics ranging from dramatic celebrity to women’s political agency to the parental emotion of grief, this volume provides a fresh and at times provocative assessment of the "historical affects"—financial, emotional, and socio-political—that transformed Renaissance theater. Instead of treating history and affect as mutually exclusive theoretical or philosophical contexts, the essays in this volume ask readers to consider how drama emplaces the most personal, unspeakable passions in matrices defined in part by financial exchange, by erotic desire, by gender, by the material body, and by theatricality itself. As it encourages this conversation to take place, the collection provides scholars and students alike with a series of new perspectives, not only on the plays, emotions, and histories discussed in its pages, but also on broader shifts and pressures animating literary studies today.

Author : S. W. Dawson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 115 pages
File Size : 40,43 MB
Release : 2017-07-06
Category : Art
ISBN : 1315388693

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First published in 1970, this book explores drama as literature and provides critical overviews of different aspects of drama and the dramatic. It first asks what a play is, before going on to examine dramatic language, action and tension, dramatic irony, characters and drama’s relationship with modern criticism and the novel. This book will be a valuable resource to those studying drama and English literature.

Author : David Krasner
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 36,66 MB
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1118893204

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A History of Modern Drama: Volume II explores a remarkable breadth of topics and analytical approaches to the dramatic works, authors, and transitional events and movements that shaped world drama from 1960 through to the dawn of the new millennium. Features detailed analyses of plays and playwrights, examining the influence of a wide range of writers, from mainstream icons such as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee, to more unorthodox works by Peter Weiss and Sarah Kane Provides global coverage of both English and non-English dramas – including works from Africa and Asia to the Middle East Considers the influence of art, music, literature, architecture, society, politics, culture, and philosophy on the formation of postmodern dramatic literature Combines wide-ranging topics with original theories, international perspective, and philosophical and cultural context Completes a comprehensive two-part work examining modern world drama, and alongside A History of Modern Drama: Volume I, offers readers complete coverage of a full century in the evolution of global dramatic literature.