“At the beginning stands Wedekind.” So wrote German literary critic Rudolf Kayser in 1917 of the new forms of expressionist theater that were then becoming central to German culture. In Schloss Wetterstein (Castle Wetterstein), one of his most important plays, Wedekind offers a satirical take on marriage and the bourgeois nuclear family; at the play’s center is a rebellious teenage girl who turns to prostitution after her upbringing in an unstable household. The play was published in 1912, but a performance ban was put into effect immediately, and continued until after Wedekind’s death. This new edition offers a fresh translation, an illuminating brief introduction, and a selection of background materials that help to set the play in context.

Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced Wedekind's notorious play Spring Awakening was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first complete performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from this translation by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pablé, 'scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry.' The Times This translation of Spring Awakening was first performed at the National Theatre, London on 24 May 1974. For this edition the translator, Edward Bond, has written a note on the play and a factual introduction to Wedekind's life and work.

Two of Wedekind's most seminal plays, "e;Earth Spirit"e; and "e;Pandora's Box"e; both focus on the actions of the young heroine Lulu, who embodies both animal sensuality and waif-like innocence, as she escapes a life on the streets, receives a society education, marries, takes on various lovers, becomes a dancer in a revue, is imprisoned for murder, and encounters Jack the Ripper. When "e;Earth Spirit"e; was premiered Leipzig in 1898, Wedekind was vilified and persecuted for advocating unfeigned sexual pleasure and making his heroine a heartless whore. "e;Death and Devil"e; and "e;Castle Wetterstein,"e; the other plays that make up this volume, are essentially extensions of and complementary to the Lulu tragedies.

Wedekind's expressionist plays influenced the whole course of modern drama A moralist who wore the mask of an immoralist, Wedekind was the terror of the German bourgeoisie. His work was censored and the original Lulu play was not even published during his lifetime; Wedekind toned it down and adapted it to make two plays: Pandora's Box and Earth-Spirit. The version in this volume, Lulu: A Monster Tragedy, is based on the first manuscript, presenting the original sexually voracious heroine to a British audience for the first time. The volume also contains Spring Awakening, "a work of great compassion that still has a lot to teach us about the dangers of battening down adolescent sex..." (Guardian). The translation of Spring Awakening ("scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry" The Times) was commissioned by the National Theatre and that of Lulu: A Monster Tragedy ("the Bonds' version is sharper and funnier than its predecessors" Guardian) was toured nationally. Both plays are complemented by the translators' historically illuminating introductions.

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.