Alan P. Barr has brought together eleven world-class modern plays by women that show not only their artistry but also their variety and their passion. Drawn from nine different countries (other than the United States and England) that use English as their literary language, the plays reflect the concerns of women across the globe. The imagery and dramatic conventions may shift and the tones vary, but the need to be strong (and its difficulty), the sense of a world that is anything but nurturing or ideal, and the suspect nature of family life and relations are constant themes. The struggle over language, in countries that are very often ex-colonies, conveys the frequent overlap between feminist and postcolonial focuses. The diversity of Englishes on stages from Singapore to South Africa is a lovely curtain call to this theater festival.

Feminism In Modern English Drama Explores The Emergence Of The New Woman In The Plays Of Bernard Shaw, Galsworthy And Granville Barker And How Their Dominating Role Revolutionized The Modern Drama. The Emphasis Shifted From The Male Protagonist To The Unwomanly Woman Who Is Shown More As A Product Of Social, Economic And Political Interactions Than Individual Creation.The Focus Is On The Early And Middle Plays Of Bernard Shaw And The Influence Of Ibsen S Plays Has Been Given Their Rightful Place. Most Of Shaw S Major Plays From Widowers Houses To Pygmalion, Come Under The Purview Of The Book, While The Plays Of Contemporaries Like Pinero, Jones And Oscar Wilde Have Been Discussed To Highlight The Contrast.More Interesting Are The Unknown Assertive Heroines Of Galsworthy S Middle And Late Plays From The Eldest Son And The Fugitive To The Skin Game. His Women Characters Remain In Oblivion Because Hardly Any Scholar Has Bothered To Study Them. Though Granville Barker Is Well-Known As A Critic And Director Of Shakespeare S Plays, His Own Plays With The New Woman As Heroine Still Remain Little Known In The Academic Circle. In The Conclusion The Bearing Of This Early Feminism Is Shown On The Feminist Playwrights Like Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems Et Al. Of The 1980S.It Is Hoped That The Present Book Will Prove An Asset To Those Who Have Keen Interest In English Drama. In Addition, The Students, Researchers And Teachers Of English Literature Will Find It An Ideal Reference Book.

This is a multidisciplinary study that reads the early modern literary and historical representations of the Muslim woman against both the European politics towards Islam and the domestic constructions of gender and social hierarchies in England.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women's travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as "an absent presence." The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home.

Looking at the plays of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Webster this book presents a new perspective on early modern drama grounded upon three original interrelated points. The author explores how the motif of the mourning woman on the early modern stage embodies the cultural trauma of the Reformation in England; brings to light the extent to which the figures of early modern drama recall those of the recent medieval past; and addresses how these representations embody actual mourning practices that were, after the Reformation, increasingly viewed as disturbing.

Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama investigates the ways in which work became a subject of inquiry on the early modern stage and the processes by which the drama began to forge new connections between labor and subjectivity in the period. The essays assembled here address fascinating and hitherto unexplored questions raised by the subject of labor as it was taken up in the drama of the period: How were laboring bodies and the goods they produced, marketed and consumed represented onstage through speech, action, gesture, costumes and properties? How did plays participate in shaping the identities that situated laboring subjects within the social hierarchy? In what ways did the drama engage with contemporary discourses (social, political, economic, religious, etc.) that defined the cultural meanings of work? How did players and playwrights define their own status with respect to the shifting boundaries between high status/low status, legitimate/illegitimate, profitable/unprofitable, skilled/unskilled, formal/informal, male/female, free/bound, paid/unpaid forms of work? Merchants, usurers, clothworkers, cooks, confectioners, shopkeepers, shoemakers, sheepshearers, shipbuilders, sailors, perfumers, players, magicians, servants and slaves are among the many workers examined in this collection. Offering compelling new readings of both canonical and lesser-known plays in a broad range of genres (including history plays, comedies, tragedies, tragi-comedies, travel plays and civic pageants), this collection considers how early modern drama actively participated in a burgeoning, proto-capitalist economy by staging England's newly diverse workforce and exploring the subject of work itself.