Through the great diversity of topics and methodologies the essays in this volume make a seminal contribution to an under-researched field at the intersection of literary and cultural criticism, comparative literature, and theatre as well as translation studies. The essays cover a wide range of texts from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. From a broad variety of perspectives the exchange between drama and theatre of the Anglophone and the Germanophone worlds and their mutual influence are explored. While there is a focus on the successful or unsuccessful bridging of the cultural gaps, due consideration is given to the nexus between intercultural translation and mise en scène as well as the intricacies of intermedial reshaping. Always placing the analyses within the political and socio-historical contexts the essays make an innovative contribution to the aesthetics of Anglo-German theatrical exchange as well as to European cultural history.

Anglo-German Dramatic and Poetic Encounters contains essays focusing on the roles of drama and poetry in Anglo-German exchange in the Sattelzeit. It offers new perspectives on the movement of texts and ideas across genres and cultures, the formation and reception of poetic personae, and the place of illustration in cross-cultural, textual exchange.

This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.

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.

Weighs the value of Germanophone culture, and its study, in an age of globalization, transnationalism, and academic change.

Oscar Wilde in Vienna is the first book-length study in English of the reception of Oscar Wilde’s works in the German-speaking world. Charting the plays’ history on Viennese stages between 1903 and 2013, it casts a spotlight on the international reputation of one of the most popular English-language writers while contributing to Austrian cultural history in the long twentieth century. Drawing on extensive archival material, the book examines the appropriation of Wilde's plays against the background of political crises and social transformations. It unravels the mechanisms of cultural transfer and canonisation within an environment positioned — like Wilde himself — at the crossroads of centre and periphery, tradition and modernity.