This collection of essays, covering a broad historical range, shows that women working in theatre and drama since the time of Aphra Behn have been engaged in pushing the boundaries of conventional representation and dramaturgical convention. Collectively the authors show that women have used performing spaces as a channel for both political and personal radicalism - one that has demanded and celebrated experimentalism as a kind of survival in a male dominated world.

This book explores the history of women’s engagement with writing experimentally. Women writers have long used different narratives and modes of writing as a way of critiquing worlds and stories that they find themselves at odds with, but at the same time, as a way to participate in such spaces. Experimentation—of style, mode, voice, genre and language—has enabled women writers to be simultaneously creative and critical, engaged in and yet apart from stories and cultures that have so often...

This book situates the production of The Boy Friend and the Players' Theatre in the context of a post-war London and reads The Boy Friend, and Wilson's later work, as exercises in contemporary camp. It argues for Wilson as a significant and transitional figure both for musical theatre and for modes of homosexuality in the context of the pre-Wolfenden 1950s.Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend is one of the most successful British musicals ever written. First pro...

Writing Well is a practical handbook of creative writing exercises which forms the basis of an indirect, nonconfrontational approach specifically intended for therapeutic use within the mental health field. Although people with emotional or psychological problems can find creative writing particularly difficult and unsettling, when writing courses are sensitively designed they are known to be of therapeutic benefit to people with mental health problems. The exercises are taken from the aut...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.The Trojan Horse traces the growth of commercial sponsorship in the public sphere since the 1960s, its growing importance for the arts since 1980 and its spread into areas such as education and health. The authors' central argument is that the image of sponsorship as corporate benevolence has served to routinize and legitimate the pr...

Now in its second edition and with new chapters covering such texts as Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love and 'yummy mummy' novels such as Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It, this is a wide-ranging survey of popular women's fiction from 1945 to the present.Examining key trends in popular writing for women in each decade, Women's Fiction offers case study readings of major British and American writers. Through these readings, the book explores...

At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today’s are often whimsical or ironic, but ar...

Winner of four major prizes for the best critical/biographical book related to crime fiction: the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and H.R.F. Keating Awards; and shortlisted for both the Agatha and Gold Dagger Awards.‘Martin Edwards is the closest thing there has been to a philosopher of crime writing.’ The TimesIn the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their C...

The grandson of biologist T. H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille his eyesight then improved enough for him to start writing, and by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty and daring novels like CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923) and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). But it is as the author of his celebrated portrayal of a nightmare future soci...

‘A wonderfully candid and insightful account of a writer’s life’ William BoydLuck, good or bad, plays an important part in a writer’s career.In 1976 Lodge was pursuing a ‘twin-track career’ as novelist and academic but the balancing act was increasingly difficult, and he became a full-time writer just before he published his bestselling novel Nice Work.Readers of Lodge’s novels will be fascinated by the insights this book gives – not only i...

The definitive biography of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated and controversial dramatists.To several generations, actor, playwright, songwriter, and filmmaker Noël Coward (1899–1973) was the very personification of wit, glamour, and elegance. Given unprecedented access to the private papers and correspondence of Coward family members, compatriots, and numerous lovers, Samuel Johnson Prize–winning biographer Philip Hoare has produced an illuminating and sop...

A spellbinding portrait of the Hampstead Modernists, threading together the lives, loves, rivalries and ambitions of a group of artists at the heart of an international avant-garde.Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson have embarked on a love affair – a passion that will launch an era-defining art movement.In her chronicle of the exhilarating rise and fall of British Modernism, Caroline Maclean c...