Renaissance Europe was the scene of flourishing and innovative dramatic art, and seventeenth-century Spain enjoyed its own Golden Age of the stage. According to traditional studies of this period, however, men seemed to be the only participants. Now in Dramas of Distinction, Teresa Scott Soufas offers the first book-length critical study of five important women playwrights: Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallen de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman, and Marfa de Zayas y Sotomayor. By locating the plays within their period, Soufas avoids universalizing women without regard to history. Her approach transcends the simple measurement of women authors against male models. Confronting the issue of female silence demanded by seventeenth-century Spanish patriarchy, Soufas compares the drive to limit and contain theater space to Renaissance society's efforts to limit and contain women. Yet these dramatists still found ways to question their own roles and male authority. Caro and Cueva investigate the difficult relationship between women and monarchy. Azevedo explores the ways Renaissance women become commodities in the marriage market. Cross-dressed women characters add carnivalesque implications to three plays in which gender identities are unstable. Finally, Enrfquez challenges the precepts of Lope de Vega's comedia nueva as she attempts to adhere to classical formal principles and reject the public playhouse. As a companion to the recently published anthology Women's Acts, also edited by Soufas, this study significantly contributes not only to Hispanic studies but also to women's studies, Renaissance studies, and comparative literature.

This book examines the creative strategies, narrative characteristics, industrial practices and stylistic tendencies of complex serial drama. Exemplified by shows like HBO’s The Sopranos, AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad, Showtime’s Dexter, and Netflix’s Stranger Things, complex serials are distinguished by their conceptual originality, narrative complexity, transgressive lead characters and serial allure. As a drama form that continues to expand and diversify in today’s television, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black and Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale provide further examples. Dunleavy investigates the strategies that underpin the innovations, influence and success of complex serial drama, giving students and scholars a nuanced understanding of this contemporary TV form.

How was it possible for drama, especially biblical representations, to appear in the Christian West given the church's condemnation of the theatrum of the ancient world?In a book with radical implications for the study of medieval literature, Lawrence Clopper resolves this perplexing question. Drama, Play, and Game demonstrates that the theatrum repudiated by medieval clerics was not "theater" as we understand the term today. Clopper contends that critics have misrepresented Western stage history because they have assumed that theatrum designates a place where drama is performed. While theatrum was thought of as a site of spectacle during the Middle Ages, the term was more closely connected with immodest behavior and lurid forms of festive culture. Clerics were not opposed to liturgical representations in churches, but they strove ardently to suppress May games, ludi, festivals, and liturgical parodies. Medieval drama, then, stemmed from a more vernacular tradition than previously acknowledged-one developed by England's laity outside the boundaries of clerical rule.

"Addressing myself to the two-fold problem of the nature of philosophical activity and the cultural tasks of the philosophical profession, I have sought to develop the outlines of a critical reappraisal of the nature and place of philosophy in human experience"--Preface.

The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.

In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever plotlines, and six-episode seasons that left audiences frantic for more. In Transatlantic Television Drama, volume editors Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills, and Roberta Pearson team up with leading scholars in TV studies and transnational television to look at how serial dramas like Black Mirror captivate US audiences, and what this reveals about the ways Americans and Brits relate to each other on and off the screen. Focusing on production strategies, performance styles, and audience reception, chapters delve into some of the most widely-discussed programs on the transatlantic circuit, from ongoing series like Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Orphan Black, and Sherlock, to those with long histories of transnational circulation like Masterpiece and Doctor Who, to others whose transnational success speaks to the process of exchange, adaptation, and cooperation such as Rome, Parade's End, Broadchurch, and Gracepoint. The book's first section investigates the platforms that support British/American exchange, from distribution partnerships and satellite providers to streaming services. The second section concentrates on the shift in meaning across cultural contexts, such as invocations of heritage, genre shifts in adaptation, performance styles, and, in the case of Episodes, actual dramatized depiction of the process of transatlantic television production. In section three, attention turns to contexts of audience reception, ranging from fan conventions and fiction to television criticism, the effects of national branding on audiences, and the role of social media in de- or re-contextualizing fans' response to transnational programs.

The first volume of this series surveyed the great world dramatists to gather concepts and ideas to apply to the real stage, which is the universe God has made and centered into himself as an actor. This volume describes the actors, the dramatis personae. This is his theological anthropology concerning man, his freedom and destiny in the light of biblical revelation. Von Balthasar is concerned here with the dramatic character of existence as a whole, approaching the topic through a consideration of the various conditions and situations of mankind as a drama that involves both the Creator and his creatures.