Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies have a family drama at their heart. This book brings these relationships to life, offering a radical new perspective on the tragic heroes and their dilemmas. Family Dramas: Intimacy, Power and Systems in Shakespeare's Tragedies focusses on the interactions and dialogues between people on stage, linking their intimate emotional worlds to wider social and political contexts. Since family relationships absorb and enact social ideologies, their conflicts often expose the conflicts that all ideologies contain. The complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of Shakespeare’s portrayals of individuals and their relationships are brought to life, while wider power structures and social discourses are shown to reach into the heart of intimate relationships and personal identity. Surveying relevant literature from Shakespeare studies, the book introduces the ideas behind the family systems approach to literary criticism. Explorations of gender relationships feature particularly strongly in the analysis since it is within gender that intimacy and power most compellingly intersect and frequently collide. For Shakespeare lovers and psychotherapists alike, this application of systemic theory opens a new perspective on familiar literary territory.

Now a Netflix Limited Series "...A compulsively readable tour de force." —The Wall Street Journal New York Times Book Review recommends M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family and lauds it as a “page-turner” that forces the reader to confront “the compromises we make with ourselves to be the people we believe our beloveds expect.” (NYTimes Book Review Summer Reading Issue) M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family is a gripping legal thriller that forces the reader to consider: How far would you go to protect the ones you love? In this twisted narrative of love and murder, a horrific crime makes a seemingly normal family question everything they thought they knew about their life—and one another. Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him? Stella’s father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect. Told in an unusual three-part structure, A Nearly Normal Family asks the questions: How well do you know your own children? How far would you go to protect them?

Exhausted by constant fighting, the Mitchell family is basking in the midst of an unexpected truce. Joel has fled to Chicago to escape his failed marriage and business ventures. Excited about climbing out of his pit of despair, Joel is eager to get divorced and start over. Tranquility is fleeting when he finds out that his wife, Zarah, is pregnant. Now he's faced with doing the right thing, but the only problem is he doesn't know what that is. Meanwhile, Zarah is willing to pine over Joel until he returns, certain the baby is going to solve their problems. Tamara, the fiery Mitchell heir who's obsessed with empowering women, refuses to watch Zarah grovel for the affection of an undeserving man, even if it is her brother. As Joel teeters with a decision, Tamara prods Zarah to take the reins. Tamara's commitment isn't purely altruistic. She wants to buddy up, gain allegiance, and ultimately undermine the family business. Is there hope for the Mitchell family as layers of strife begin to shed? Will God be able to soften their hearts?

First published in 1990. This book is the first specifically about television drama from within a cultural studies perspective and as such examines the active agency of both viewers and media practitioners. The author examines dominant and counter-myths as they circulate in popular culture, discussing soap opera, science fiction, sitcom, cop series and 'authored' drama among its examples. It works within an ethnographic framework, he looks in detail at both the production and reception of TV drama. The overall aim of the book is to examine television representation as part of an historically positioned and differentiated social formation in which knowledgeable actors work in every institutional arena (whether media industry, academia or domestic household) to make their meanings.

Life Beyond Drama encourages us to do the road less travelled and dive into the depths of our life stories, myths, and dramas in order to understand where these things come from, why we engage with negative energy-draining dramas, how we engage in these dramas, and what they actually look like. Looking into any arena in life, every day we can all admit that drama is everywhere. We have heard so much about our thirst for healing, wholeness, and living the life we have always been meant to live. Dramas prevent us from getting to these places. This book offers us tools via a path of self-reflection in everyday life, which can lead us to a life beyond drama, where endless potential and possibilities await.

In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing surveys Asian American cinema, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge.

American drama is chiefly a drama of realistic family plays and its conventions revolve around the antagonistic impulses of security and freedom. Scanlan asserts that America's best plays are plays of family life and that they re-enact dilemmas of personal psychology and family structure.