An analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms with the holocaust and its impact on post-war German society.

This critical exploration of modern drama begins with Büchner and Ibsen and then discusses the major playwrights who have shaped modern theater. A new introduction by the author assesses developments of recent years.

Exploring the relationship between dramatic language and its theatrical aspects, Reading Modern Drama provides an accessible entry point for general readers and academics into the world of contemporary theatre scholarship. This collection promotes the use of diverse perspectives and critical methods to explore the common theme of language as well as the continued relevance of modern drama in our lives. Reading Modern Drama offers provocative close readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays, from Hedda Gabler to e.e. cummings' Him. Taken together, these essays enter into an ongoing, fruitful debate about the terms 'modern' and 'drama' and build a much-needed bridge between literary studies and performance studies.

The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.

This book focuses on the various problems in the verbal and nonverbal translation and tranposition of drama from one language and cultural background into another and from the text on to the stage. It covers a range of previously unpublished essays specifically written on translation problems unique to drama, by playwrights and literary translators as well as theorists, scholars and teachers of drama and translation studies