ENG 380 Dramatic Literature (Julie Quarles)

This volume brings together the three most influential ancient Greek treatises on literature. Aristotle's Poetics contains his treatment of Greek tragedy: its history, nature, and conventions, with details on poetic diction. Stephen Halliwell's authoritative introduction traces the work's debt to earlier theorists (especially Plato), its distinctive argument, and the reasons behind its enduring relevance.

Angela Curran introduces and assesses: Aristotle's life and the background to the Poetics, the ideas and text of the Poetics, the continuing importance of Aristotle's work to philosophy today.

Elizabeth Belfiore offers a striking new interpretation of Aristotle's Poetics by situating the work within the Aristotelian corpus and in the context of Greek culture in general. In Aristotle's Rhetoric, the Politics, and the ethical, psychological, logical, physical, and biological works, Belfiore finds extremely important but largely neglected sources for understanding the elliptical statements in the Poetics.

Throughout the centuries Aristotle's Poetics remained something of a mystery. What was the great philosopher trying to say about the nature of drama and storytelling? What did he mean by pity, fear and catharsis? In this book, Ari Hiltunen explains the mystery of the 'proper pleasure', which, according to Aristotle, is the goal of drama and can be brought about by using certain storytelling strategies.

This collection of essays deals individually with Wilson's five major plays and also addresses issues crucial to his canon: the role of history, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden's collages, and the politics of drama.

This book offers essays and interviews addressing Wilson's work, ranging from examinations of the presence of Wilson's politics in his plays to the limitations of these politics on contemporary interpretations of Black aesthetics.

A comprehensive study of August Wilson's drama introduces the major themes and motifs that unite Wilson's ten-play cycle about African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. Framed by Wilson's life experiences and informed by his extensive interviews, this book provides detailed readings of each play, well-situated in the extant scholarship. It also provides an overview of the cycle as a whole, demonstrating how it comprises a compelling interrogation of American culture and historiography. Wilson's improvisational logics become crucial to expressing his notions of black identity and resituating the relationship of literal to figurative in the African American community.

A comprehensive view of the plays of August Wilson. It looks at their thematic structure, places them within the context of American drama, and examines the distinctively African American experiences they dramatize. There is a chapter on The Piano Lesson.

Premiering in 1944 and winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams' first popular success. The play introduced Williams' notion of plastic, or sculptural, drama as he incorporated both sound and lighting into his stage directions in an attempt to heighten the audience's emotional experience.

Tennessee Williams' 1944 play The Glass Menagerie centers around a family of three, exploring what it means to share a household with people whose individual psychological eccentricities threaten to overwhelm the whole. The book includes an examination of Williams' life and influences and takes a hard look at key ideas related to the play.

Poet, dramatist, novelist, critic, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones, vividly recounts his crusading role in African American literature. When first published in 1984, the publisher made substantial cuts in the copy. Under the careful direction of the author, the book has been restored to its original form.

This is the first study to assess Fornes's complete body of work. Scott T. Cummings considers comic sketches, opera libretti and unpublished pieces, as well as her best-known plays, in order to trace the evolution of her dramaturgy from the whimsical Off-Off Broadway plays of the 1960s to the sober, meditative work of the 1990s.

In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. Larson's study begins with a survey of Parks's earliest and most difficult texts including Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World. Larson then analyzes Venus, In the Blood, and the Lincoln Plays: The America Play and the Pulitzer Prize-winning TopDog/Underdog

The seven plays to date of Yasmina Reza, one of France's most prominent female playwrights, are popular both in France and abroad. This text seeks to unpack the essentials of Reza's style and to explore each play as a component of Reza's theatrical oeuvre.

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 Pinter to Tom Stoppard. Chapters reveal the movement's origins, development and present-day influence upon popular culture around the world.

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd , which suggests that 'absurd' plays purport the meaninglessness of life, this book uses the works of five major playwrights of the 1950s to provide a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre 'movements' of the 20th century.

This work covers the canon of playwright Edward Albee. Comprehensive entries detail the plays and major characters. Other features include biographical information and insights into Albee's artistic beliefs, his understanding of the playwright's responsibility, the importance of music in drama, and the technical craft of writing plays.