Staging Subversions: The Performance-within-a-Play in French Classical Theater defines a new type of metadrama using Le Tartuffe as its paradigm and explores the complex, ambiguous, and enlightening relationships that metadrama maintains with the social and political orders. While metadramatic scenes are most often concerned with theater itself, the performance-within-a-play adopts an important function in the play's plot, and, consequently, in the social world of the play. The performance-within-a-play is particularly associated by the classical playwrights with the family structure, with the class system, with women's social roles, and with the politics of absolutism.

Staging Violence explores gender violence in Spanish early modern short theater. This book deals with domestic violence against women, extortion of prostitutes, and violence against men who display non-conventional forms of masculinity. The author argues that many "jácaras" and "entremeses" stage subversive discourses that repudiate or complicate official narratives of gender and the use of violence as a tool for achieving gender compliance. Short comic pieces are read against comedias. Each section of the book is expertly contextualized through an overview of the legal and moral contexts and the analysis of a variety of primary sources (law codes, manuals of conduct, church rulings, transcripts of civil and religious trials, and medical manuals) as well as statistical information. Staging Violence invites the reader to consider the transgressive potential of performance. As the first monograph entirely dedicated to the study of gender in this genre, this book is a vital resource for students and scholars interested in gender studies and theatre.

Staging Stigma is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

This monograph details Gutzkow's recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow's transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Königsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow's decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow's plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.

The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Cath

"Examines the wide-ranging influence of games and play on the development of modern art in the twentieth century"--Provided by publisher.

From Swift's repulsive shit-flinging Yahoos to Beckett's dying but never quite dead moribunds, Irish literature has long been perceived as being synonymous with subversion and all forms of subversiveness. But what constitutes a subversive text or a subversive writer in twenty-first-century Ireland? The essays in this volume set out to redefine and rethink the subversive potential of modern Irish literature. Crossing three central genres, one common denominator running through these essays whether dealing with canonical writers like Yeats, Beckett and Flann O'Brien, or lesser known contemporary writers like Sebastian Barry or Robert McLiam Wilson, is the continual questioning of Irish identity - Irishness - going from its colonial paradigm and stereotype of the subaltern in MacGill, to its uneasy implications for gender representation in the contemporary novel and the contemporary drama. A subsidiary theme inextricably linked to the identity problematic is that of exile and its radical heritage for all Irish writing irrespective of its different genres. Sub-Versions offers a cross-cultural and trans-national response to the expanding interest in Irish and postcolonial studies by bringing together specialists from different national cultures and scholarly contexts - Ireland, Britain, France and Central Europe. The order of the essays is by genre. This study is aimed both at the general literary reader and anyone particularly interested in Irish Studies.