Canadian author James K. Moran's debut collection of dark fiction offers fantasy, sci-fi, and horror shot through with hope and friendship. Inside, readers will discover sea serpents among the roiling waters of the St. Lawrence River under a dilapidated international bridge; a misguided bi mage negotiating with a demon he accidentally summoned into his dorm; a baby monitor issuing the voice of an inter-dimensional dark god; a couple in Picton County fleeing an ancient entity they cannot se...

"My masters will follow the example of Rome... our mighty empire bestraddling the whole of civilization!"It is AD 79, and the TARDIS lands in Pompeii on the eve of the town's destruction. Mount Vesuvius is ready to erupt and bury its surroundings in molten lava, just as history dictates. Or is it?The Doctor and Donna find that Pompeii is home to impossible things: circuits made of stone, soothsayers who read minds and fiery giants made of burning rock. From a lair deep in t...

Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot'...

Saving the planet, watching over the Rift, preparing the human race for the twenty-first century... Torchwood has been keeping Cardiff safe since the late 1800s. Small teams of heroes, working 24/7, encountering and containing the alien, the bizarre and the inexplicable.But Torchwood do not always see the effects of their actions. What links the Rules and Regulations for replacing a Torchwood leader to the destruction of a supermarket? How does a witness to an alien's reprisals aga...

This book argues that theatre and drama help us to understand the concern about ‘fake news’. Moran shows that ‘fake news’ has arisen in the twenty-first century through what are essentially a series of performance contexts. Although the concept of ‘fake news’ has developed to great prominence since 2016, there is a much longer history of theatre makers and thinkers grappling with the ideas that underpin our modern worries about misinformation being distributed in the press, in broadcast ne...

This is the first major book-length study for four decades to examine the plays written by D. H. Lawrence, and the first ever book to give an in-depth analysis of Lawrence's interaction with the theatre industry during the early twentieth century. It connects and examines his performance texts, and explores his reaction to a wide-range of theatre (from the sensation dramas of working-class Eastwood to the ritual performances of the Pueblo people) in order to explain Lawrence's contribution...

This book examines the powerful influence of civil law on understandings and responses to madness in England and in New Jersey. The influence of civil law on the history of madness has not hitherto been of major academic investigation. This body of law, established and developed over a five hundred year period, greatly influenced how those from England’s propertied classes understood and responded to madness. Moreover, the civil law governing the response to madness in England was successf...

This Critical Companion to the work of one of Ireland's most famous and controversial playwrights, Sean O'Casey, is the first major study of the playwright's work to consider his oeuvre and the archival material that has appeared during the last decade. Published ahead of the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland with which O'Casey's most famous plays are associated, it provides a clear and detailed study of the work in context and performance.James Moran shows that O'Case...

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of t...

Sean O'Casey is one of Ireland's best-known writers. He is the most frequently performed playwright in the history of the Irish National Theatre, and his work is often revived onstage elsewhere. O'Casey is also widely studied in schools, colleges, and universities in the English-speaking world. This book offers a new contextualisation of this famous writer's work, revisiting his association with Irish nationalism, historical revisionism, and celebrated contemporaries such as W. B. Yeats an...

What distinguishes modern tragedy from other forms of drama? How does it relate to contemporary political and social conditions? To what ends have artists employed the tragic form in different locations during the 20th century?Partly motivated by the urgency of our current situation in an age of ecocidal crisis, Modern Tragedy encompasses a variety of drama from throughout the 20th century. James Moran begins this book with John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea

Five gripping novelisations of TV adventures set in perilous periods of Earth history.In The Reign of Terror, by Ian Marter, the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara find themselves in 18th Century Paris, in the midst of the terrifying French Revolution.In The Smugglers, by Terrance Dicks, villainous pirates roam the 17th Century Cornish coast, and the First Doctor, Polly and Ben become entangled in the dubious activities of the locals.