Equus deals with Dr. Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, who is confronted with Alan Strang, a boy who has blinded six horses in a violent fit of passion. This very passion is as foreign to Dysart as the act itself. To the boy's parents it is a hideous mystery; Alan has always adored horses. To Dysart it is a psychological puzzle that leads both doctor and patient to a complex and disturbingly dramatic confrontation.

Theatre program.

The book moves in a nonreductive way between literary and theological criticism to show how drama and religious thought discern the experience of evil. &"Tragic method&" refers to how tragic art functions as inquiry; &"tragic theology&" refers to how drama and theology render in thematic or symbolic form certain irreducible dimensions of evil and negativity. Bouchard defines no single tragic method or any single view of evil but searches for the distinctive interplay of tragic method of theology in each dramatist. The work opens by scrutinizing certain important interpretations of Greek tragedy. Paul Ricoeur's interpretation of &"the Wicked God and the Tragic Vision&" receives major focus, as does Sophocles, who as a tragedian dramatized the action of inquiry and interpretation. Bouchard then examines Augustine's views of evil and sin, Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of the ironies of history, and Tillich's conceptions of the demonic. By interpreting tragedy in terms of sin or the effects of sin, each theologian resists implications in his own thought pointing to a less resolvable tragic theology. And yet these theologians also contribute very creative understandings of the irreducible character of evil and tragic experience. Substantive and original readings of three playwrights are offered: Rolf Hochhuth's tragedy of vocation, The Deputy, Robert Lowell's trilogy of American historical blindness, The Old Glory, and Peter Shaffer's dreams of tragic awareness and accountability in Equus and Amadeus, revealing new permutations of the irreducibility of evil in contemporary Christian and Jewish religious thinkers who may be helpful in this task, and concludes with a description of the experience of perplexed thought, self-critical in view of tragedy's witness to irreducibility of evil.

This book is an exploration of the linguistic, structural, historical, and thematic relationships of religion and drama. It is not an attempt to sacralize drama so that it becomes a substitute for religion, nor will it reduce religion to its aesthetic dimension. What does religion tell us about drama, and what does drama tell us about religion? What have been their inter-actions in our tradition? The conversation between religion and culture, drama and Christianity, needs to be ongoing. This book is a contribution to the dialogue, asking questions, pointing towards possible answers, and encouraging others to join in the conversation.

Responding to a new interest in thematic studies, the volume features essays by some of the leading scholars from the United States and Europe. In honor of Horst S. Daemmrich, the co-author with Ingrid Daemmrich of the handbook Themes and Motifs in Western Literature, the contributors reassess, both in theory and in case studies, the viability of thematics as part of contemporary literary criticism. They demonstrate the broad scope of methodologies between strict systematization of themes and motifs and reader-response conceptions of 'theming.' Special topics include a thematology of the Jewish people; motifs in folklore; a cluster on madness, hysteria, and mastery; the story of Judith; Cinderella; thematics in Dürrenmatt and Isaac Babel; chaos as a theme. A concluding chapter illuminates aspects of nineteenth-century literary history.

In a unique study of Anglo-Jewish writers in the post-war period, Dr. Sicher traces through their works the story of the rise of the Jewish community from slum poverty to suburban affluence. This period is one of crucial social change in Britain. At the same time, Dr. Sicher raises serious questions about the modern writer's cultural and ethnic identity. In this process, Dr. Sicher advances the thesis that, under the impetus of the Holocaust, the more traditional conflict between Jewish roots and assimilation has been succeeded by a reassessment of identity and morality. Dr. Sicher's perspective on this particular period of literature is a highly original one and it should provoke creative reconsideration of other contexts and times as well.