This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel films and videogames. In turn, it uncovers how performance and new media can challenge common assumptions about tragic causality and fate. Traditional tragedies may present us with a present when a calamity is staged, a decisive moment in which everything changes. However, modern performance, adaptation and new media can question the premises of that kind of present crisis and its fatality. By offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre, adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic experience of irreversible present time. This book offers the reader a fresh understanding of tragic character and agency through these new media’s exposure of the genre’s deep structure.

This book explores how classical and Shakespearean tragedy has shaped the temporality of crisis on the stage and in time-travel films and videogames. In turn, it uncovers how performance and new media can challenge common assumptions about tragic causality and fate. Traditional tragedies may present us with a present when a calamity is staged, a decisive moment in which everything changes. However, modern performance, adaptation and new media can question the premises of that kind of present crisis and its fatality. By offering replays or alternative endings, experimental theatre, adaptation, time travel films and videogames reinvent the tragic experience of irreversible present time. This book offers the reader a fresh understanding of tragic character and agency through these new media’s exposure of the genre’s deep structure.

Time and Literature features twenty essays on topics from aesthetics and narratology to globalisation and queer temporalities, and showcases how time studies, often referred to as 'the temporal turn', cut across and illuminate research in every field of literature, as well as interdisciplinary approaches drawing upon history, philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences. Part one, Origins, addresses fundamental issues that can be traced back to the beginnings of literary criticism. Part two, Developments, shows how thinking about Time has been crucial to various interpretive revolutions that have impacted literary theory. Part three, Application, illustrates the centrality of temporal theorising to literary criticism in a variety of contemporary approaches, from ecocriticism and new materialisms to media and archive studies. The first anthology to provide a synthesis of recent scholarship on the temporality of literary language from across different national and historical periods, Time and Literature will appeal to academic researchers and interested laypersons alike.

Stories and storytelling represent powerful creative processes for communication and change across personal, organisational and community contexts. With over 80 activities collected from contributors around the world, The Story Cookbook is one of the most comprehensive collections of story-based activities currently available. The book, organised by menu courses, provides the reader with a treasure trove of activities ranging from elegant relationship-building story techniques to more complex story processes such as quantum storytelling, genre bending and provenance. Designed in an easy-to-follow format, the smorgasbord of storytelling ideas that fill this book provide rich pickings to apply and adapt for all sorts of situations. This enticing resource is a must-read for consultants, facilitators, educators, change makers and leaders interested in working with story and narrative techniques for positive change in individuals, organisations and communities.

What does it mean for early modern theatre to be 'live'? How have audiences over time experienced a sense of 'liveness'? This collection extends discussions of liveness to works from the 16th and 17th centuries, both in their initial incarnations and contemporary adaptations. Drawing on theatre and performance studies, as well as media theory, this volume uses the concept of liveness to consider how early modern theatre – including non-Western and non-traditional performance – employs embodiment, materiality, temporality and perception to impress on its audience a sensation of presence. The volume's contributors adopt varying approaches and cover a range of topics from material and textual studies, to early modern rehearsal methods, to digital and VR theatre, to the legacy of Shakespearean performance in global theatrical repertoires. This collection uses both early modern and contemporary performance practices to challenge our understanding of live performance. Productions and adaptions discussed include the Royal Shakespeare Company's Dream (2021), CREW's Hands on Hamlet (2017), Kit Monkman's Macbeth (2018), Arslanköy Theatre Company's Kraliçe Lear (2019), and a season of productions by the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival. Early Modern Liveness looks beyond theatrical events as primary sites of interpretive authority and examines the intimate and ephemeral experience of encountering early modern theatre in its diverse manifestations.

In this book leading scholars come together to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging overview of tragedy in theatre and other media from 1920 to the present. The 20th century is often considered to have witnessed the death of tragedy as a theatrical genre, but it was marked by many tragic events and historical catastrophes, from two world wars and genocide to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the anticipation and onset of climate change. The authors in this volume wrestle with this paradox and consider the degree to which the definitions, forms and media of tragedy were transformed in the modern period and how far the tragic tradition-updated in performance-still spoke to 20th- and 21st-century challenges. While theater remains the primary focus of investigation in this strikingly illustrated book, the essays also cover tragic representation-often re-mediated, fragmented and provocatively questioned-in film, art and installation, photography, fiction and creative non-fiction, documentary reporting, political theory and activism. Since 24/7 news cycles travel fast and modern crises cross borders and are reported across the globe more swiftly than in previous centuries, this volume includes intercultural encounters, various forms of hybridity, and postcolonial tragic representations. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.

For the first time, a group of distinguished authors come together to provide an authoritative exploration of the cultural history of tragedy in the Middle Ages. Reports of the so-called death of medieval tragedy, they argue, have been greatly exaggerated; and, for the Middle Ages, the stakes couldn't be higher. Eight essays offer a blueprint for future study as they take up the extensive but much-neglected medieval engagement with tragic genres, modes, and performances from the vantage points of gender, politics, theology, history, social theory, anthropology, philosophy, economics, and media studies. The result? A recuperated medieval tragedy that is as much a branch of literature as it is of theology, politics, law, or ethics and which, at long last, rejoins the millennium-long conversation about one of the world's most enduring art forms. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: forms and media; sites of performance and circulation; communities of production and consumption; philosophy and social theory; religion, ritual and myth; politics of city and nation; society and family, and gender and sexuality.