Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shocked audiences and critics alike with its assault on decorum. At base though, the play is simply a love story: an examination of a long-wedded life, filled with the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and pain that accompany the passing of many years together.While the ethos of the play is tragicomic, it is the anachronistic, melodramatic secret object—the nonexistent "son"—that upends the audience’s sense of theatrical normalc...

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, t...

Bringing together the latest research and perspectives in the fields of analytic philosophy and theater studies, this collection of essays provides a reflection of how these two fields have emerged and intersected in the twenty-first century.With contributions from leading scholars in the field and emerging voices, Philosophy, Analytic Aesthetics, and Theater provides new insights into the field of philosophy and theater. Structured in three parts, Part I, "Epistemology," ...

In Between the Lines: A Philosophy of Theatre, theatre theorist, Michael Y. Bennett offers a systematic account of theatre--thinking about theatre metaphysically, epistemologically, and ethically. To investigate theatre and its in-between spaces, Bennett introduces some basic ideas about coherence and correspondence and, much more prominently, conversations surrounding subsumption and distinctness in order to better describe theatre as a form of art. Instead of limiting the concep...

The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by, counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a shared experience.Given that viewers come to each performance with differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified by other viewers and ofte...

Michael Y. Bennett's accessible Introduction explains the complex, multidimensional nature of the works and writers associated with the absurd - a label placed upon a number of writers who revolted against traditional theatre and literature in both similar and widely different ways. Setting the movement in its historical, intellectual and cultural contexts, Bennett provides an in-depth overview of absurdism and its key figures in theatre and literature, from Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinte...

Theatrical characters’ dual existence on stage and in text presents a unique, challenging case for the analytical philosopher.Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play re-examines the ontological status of theatre and its fictional objects through the "possible worlds" thesis, arguing that theatre is not a mirror of our world, but a re-creation of it. Taking a fresh look at theatre’s key elements, including the hotly contested relationships between character and actor; onstage ...

As the first collection of essays about Oscar Wilde's comedies, the contributors re-evaluate Oscar Wilde's society plays as 'comedies of manners" to see whether this is actually an apt way to read Wilde's most emblematic plays. Focusing on both the context and the texts, the collection locates Wilde both in his social and literary contexts.

This book is the first collection of essays to discuss Oscar Wilde’s love and vast knowledge of philosophy. Over the past few decades, Oscar Wilde scholars have become increasingly aware of Wilde’s love and intimate knowledge of philosophy. Wilde’s “Oxford Notebooks” and his soon-to-be-published “Notebook on Philosophy” all point to Wilde not just as an aesthete, but also as a serious philosophical thinker.The aim of this collection is not to make the statement that Wilde was a phi...

This exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. The last three decades have seen a remarkable revival of the performance of ancient Greek drama; some ancient plays - "Sophocles", "Oedipus", "Euripides", and "Medea" - have established a distinguished place in the international performance repertoire, and attracted eminent directors including Peter Stein, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Sellars, and Katie Mitch...

The main purpose of this volume is to look into a wide spectrum of artistic ventures which cross boundaries and challenge habitual thinking, consequently involving an element of provocation. While it is true that not all great art is provocative, the most memorable artefacts are these which have confounded our aesthetic expectations or stirred our moral imagination. However, as the turn of the millennium witnessed ever more shocking artistic gestures of provocation, the question arises if ...

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Nonfiction**NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME MAGAZINE, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, VOX, SALON, LIT HUB, AND VANITY FAIR“Entertaining and illuminating.”--The New Yorker * “Compulsively readable.”--New York Times * “Delicious, humane, probing.”--Vulture * “The best and most important book about acting I've ever re...