A new edition of the celebrated introduction to dramaturgy training and practiceSince its release in 2010, Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy has become the international standard for dramaturgy training and practice. The first textbook introduced students to the “ghost light” model of dramaturgy—a creatively engaged, artistically vibrant approach that draws on extensive knowledge of theatre history, practice, and theory—and this second e...

Monstrous Utopias examines how monsters in performance, theatre, media, and literature reflect and subvert societal understandings.This book considers the ethical and hopeful work of monsters and examines ways in which playwrights, theatre and performance artists, film artists, drag artists, dancers, cultural practitioners, and activists have engaged the monster to reflect the ongoing fears (including racist, sexist, homophobic, and others) of our society and how those mon...

Collecting together Fin del Mundo, Valley of the Heart, and Adíos Mamá Carlota, this book compiles the latest plays of Luis Valdez and explores how they stand to be considered masterpieces by the man who brought the world Zoot Suit and La Bamba.Luis Valdez has been described as the “last of the great American playwrights,” referring to a Golden Age of U.S. playwriting that began with Eugene O’Neill and included Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, ...

Staging Monstrous Bodies: Questioning Normative Orders brings together global perspectives from leading and emerging scholars to explore the intersections of monster studies and performances studies.Divided into three parts, the volume explores the connection between monstrosity and performance, such as representations of violence, gender and sexuality contexts, disability studies perspectives, anti-racism and post-colonial issues, and monstrosity as an artistic practice a...

The long-awaited follow-up to Garland-Thomson's field-defining book Freakery, Freak Inheritance illuminates the convergence of the freak show era with the eugenics era, explicating the cultural work of the freak show as a compelling range of performances of cultural and social Others that emerge as eugenic targets from the late 19th century into the 20th century and beyond. This book explores the wildly popular performances that told compelling stories about categories of...

Working theatrically with technologySystemic Dramaturgy offers an invigorating, practical look at the daunting cultural problems of the digital age as they relate to performance. Authors Michael Mark Chemers and Mike Sell reject the incompatibility of theatre with robots, digital media, or video games. Instead, they argue that technology is the original problem of theatre: How can we tell this story and move this audience with these tools? And if we have d...

**Literary critic Ryan Ruby uncovers the secret history of poetry in a mock-academic verse essay filled with wit and wisdom.One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2024**Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Epic in sweep, Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet—from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the ...

An examination of subversive games like The Sims—games designed for political, aesthetic, and social critique.For many players, games are entertainment, diversion, relaxation, fantasy. But what if certain games were something more than this, providing not only outlets for entertainment but a means for creative expression, instruments for conceptual thinking, or tools for social change? In Critical Play, artist and game designer Mary Flanagan exami...

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater collects a critical mass of border-crossing scholarship on the intersections of dance and theatre. Taking corporeality as an idea that unites the work of dance and theater scholars and artists, and embodiment as a negotiation of power dynamics with important stakes, these essays focus on the politics and poetics of the moving body in performance both on and off stage. Contemporary stage performances have sparked global interest in new exper...

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject.Contributors include Dave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitn...

In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics edited by internationally lauded scholars Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and the late Randy Martin presents a compendium of newly-commissioned chapters that address the interdisciplinary and global scope of dance theory - it...

Can fairy tales subvert consumerism? Can fantasy and children's literature counter the homogenizing influence of globalization? Can storytellers retain their authenticity in the age of consumerism? These are some of the critical questions raised by Jack Zipes, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and children's literature. In this book, Zipes argues that, despite a dangerous reconfiguration of children as consumers in the civilizing process, children's literature, fairy tales, and storyte...