Twentieth-Century European Drama [Hardcover]

This volume offers critical and theoretical perspectives on some of the major figures in European drama in the twentieth century. There are thirteen essays covering Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, comtemporary German theatre, and Dario Fo and Franca Rame. These specially commissioned essays combine contemporary theory with a discussion of the dramatic work of the playwrights who created modern drama in Europe.Notes on the Contributors - Introduction: Thirteen Essays in Search of a Reader; B.Docherty - Female Masks: Luigi Pirandello's Plays for Women; S.Bassnett - The Theatre of Bertolt Brecht: Theory and Practice; R.Speirs - Witkewicz and the Theatre of Death; R.Howard - Beckett's Stage of Deconstruction; L.St John Butler - Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty; B.L.Knapp - Ionesco's Plays: A Conspiracy of the Mind; M.J.Hayes - The Heroic World of Jean Anouilh; A.Amoia - Arrabal's Theatre of Liberation; C.Schumacher - Artaud and Genet's The Maids; G.Day - Weiss/Brooke: Marat/Sade; G.Holderness - Time, Identity and Being: The World of Vaclav Havel; P.Majer - The Germans in Britain; A-M.Taylor - The Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Laughing All the Way to the Revolution; A.Montgomery - IndexBRIAN DOCHERTY is a Tutor in Literature for Birbeck College Centre for Extra-Mural Studies in London. He is co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Suspense: Form Poe to Conan Doyle, editor of American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, Twentieth-Century American Drama, Twentieth-Century European Drama, American Modernist Poetry, Twentieth-Century British Poetry, 1900-50, Twentieth-Century British Poetry, 1950-90, and The Beat Generation.