THEA 204 / ENGL 234, Performance History II: 1600-1900 (Anna Griffith)

Indigenous Storywork is the result of this research and it demonstrates how stories have the power to educate and heal the heart, mind, body, and spirit. It builds on the seven principles of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy that form a framework for understanding the characteristics of stories, appreciating the process of storytelling, establishing a receptive learning context, and engaging in holistic meaning-making. [From Publisher]

How do characters tell stories in plays and for what dramatic purpose? This volume provides the first systematic analysis of narrative episodes in drama from an interactional perspective, applying sociolinguistic theories of narrative and insights from conversation analysis to literary dialogue. The aim of the book is to show how narration can become drama and how analysis of the way a character tells a story can be the key to understanding its role in the unfolding action. [From Publisher]

T'xwelátse is a man. He was turned to stone but he is still alive. He connects us to time immemorial. He is at the heart of the exhibition Man Turned to Stone: T'xwelátse as it was produced at The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford in April 2011. The exhibition told the story of Stone T'xwelátse. It described how he was transformed to become a part of the Stó:lō cultural landscape and explored the history of colonization that led to his being lost for more than one hundred years. It also documented the cultural revival and complex process of repatriation that brought him home again. Of course, the exhibition had to be taken down at the end of its run. Like the exhibition, this book tells the story of Stone T'xwelátse. [From Website]

Hearing Voices takes a fresh look at sound in the poetry and prose of colonial Latin American poet and nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51-95). A voracious autodidact, Sor Juana engaged with early modern music culture in a way that resonates deeply in her writing. Despite the privileging of harmony within Sor Juana's work, however, links between the poet's musical inheritance and subjects such as acoustics, cognition, writing, and visual art have remained unexplored. [From Publisher]

Book chapter: Multi-Didaxis in the Drama of Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Book chapter: Sor Juana Criolla and the Mexican Archive: Public Performances

The impact of naturalism, a literary approach invented by Zola and especially significant in the field of the novel through his American «disciples» Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, is well acknowledged and recognized. Not so well recognized, but equally important, is naturalistic theatre; this was a style that also originated with Zola, but its progeny was more international and its significance more radical and insurrectionary than in the less «spectacular» genre of fiction. The Theatre of Naturalism: Disappearing Act establishes the incipiently revolutionary context (between the Paris Communist Commune, crushed in 1871, and the successful Bolshevik insurrection of October 1917) – more or less foregrounded or in the background of works by Zola, Strindberg, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Synge, Shaw, and Tolstoy, focused especially on issues of class struggle and class war, as well as the prospects and possibilities of challenging the hegemony of the ruling orders. [From Publisher]

The Vast and Terrible Drama is a critical study of the context in which authors such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created their most significant work. In 1896 Frank Norris wrote: "Terrible things must happen to the characters of the naturalistic tale. They must be twisted from the ordinary . . . and flung into the throes of a vast and terrible drama." There could be "no teacup tragedies here." This volume broadens our understanding of literary naturalism as a response to these and other aesthetic concerns of the 19th century. [From Publisher]

A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre provides essential primary sources which document one of the key movements in modern theatre. Christopher Innes has selected three writers to exemplify the movement, and six plays in particular:
* Henrik Ibsen - A Dolls House and Hedda Gabler
* Anton Chekhov - The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard
* George Bernard Shaw - Mrs Warren's Profession and Heartbreak House. [From Publisher]

In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of her extensive body of work, investigates and invigorates literary and cultural history. [From Publisher]

This new collection of essays on American stage and film melodrama assesses the multifarious and contradictory uses to which melodrama has been put in American culture from the late 18th century to the present. It focuses on the various ways in which the genre has periodically intervened in debates over race, class, gender and sexuality and, in this manner, has also persistently contributed to the formation and transformation of American nationhood: from the debates over who constitutes the newborn nation in the Early Republic, to the subsequent conflict over abolition and the discussion of gender roles at the turn of the 19th century, to the fervent class struggles of the 1930s and the critiques of domestic containment in the 1950s, as well as to ongoing debates of gender, race, and sexuality today. [From Publisher]

German Expressionist Theatre considers the powerfully stylized, antirealistic styles of symbolic acting on the German Expressionist stage from 1916 to 1921. It relates this striking departure from the dominant European acting tradition of realism to the specific cultural crises that enveloped the German nation during the course of its involvement in World War I. The examination of portions of previously untranslated Expressionist scripts and actor memoirs allows for an unprecedented focus on description and analysis of the acting itself. [From Publisher]

Suzan-Lori Parks continues her examination of black people in history and stage through the life of the so-called "Hottentot Venus," an African woman displayed semi-nude throughout Europe due to her extraordinary physiognomy; in particular, her enormous buttocks. She was befriended, bought and bedded by a doctor who advanced his scientific career through his anatomical measurements of her after her premature death. [From Publisher]

Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater and its representations of medieval Japanese tales and tradition, reframing Edo kabuki as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity. Challenging the common understanding of kabuki as subversive, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history. [From Publisher]

Masterpieces of Kabuki contains eighteen outstanding dramas taken from the landmark four-volume series Kabuki Plays On Stage. Together they cover the entire spectrum of kabuki drama from 1697 to 1905, the period during which kabuki's dramaturgy flourished prior to the onset of Western dramatic influence. Major playwrights, chronological periods of playwriting, and a variety of play types (history, domestic, and dance dramas) and performance styles are represented. All but one are in the current repertory and regularly staged. The volume includes introductions to each play and a new general introduction highlighting kabuki's historical development and relating the plays to their performance context. [From Publisher]

This book is a feminist reading of gender performance and construction of the female role players, onnogata, of the Kabuki theatre. It is not limited to a 'theatre arts' focus, rather it is a mapping and close analysis of transformative genders through several historical periods in Japan (the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries). [From Publisher]

Significant study of Kabuki playwriting of the Edo Period (1603-1867), based around an examination and translation of the only extant treatise fully devoted to the subject, the 1801 Kezairoku, Sakusha no Shikih (Valuable Notes on Playwriting, A Playwrights' Methodology.) [From Publisher]

Nothing reflects the beauty of life as much as Japanese theater. It is here that reality is held suspended and the mind is filled with words, music, dance, and mysticism. In this groundbreaking book, Professor A.L. Sadler's translations come alive, bringing the mysteries of Noh, Kyogen, and Kabuki to modern readers worldwide. This influential classic provides a cross-section of Japanese theater that gives the reader a sampler of its beauty and power. [From Publisher]

This study traces the origins of French feminism to Neoclassical theatre and the court of Louis XIV. Through feminist revisionist histories of French literature, the Neoclassical plots and female archetypes from Racine's Phedre and Andromache, Voltaire's Brutus (Catherine Bernard) and Marmontel's Belisarius (Stephanie Genlis) were transposed by women writers and patrons onto actresses and the queens, empresses and mistresses of the French ruling dynasties from Louis XIV- to Napoleon at a time when women were denied the rights of citizenship. Women authors include Bernard, Genlis, Olympe de Gouges and Germaine de Staël, among others. [From Publisher]

In this interdisciplinary history on the emergence of modern drama in European culture, Matthew S. Buckley contends that the political theatricality of the Revolution tested and forced the evolution of dramatic forms, supplanting the theater itself as the primary stage of formal development. Drawing on a wide range of texts and images, he demonstrates how the social and political enlistment of dramatic theatricality inflected rising social and political tensions in pre-Revolutionary France, shaped French Revolutionary political culture, conditioned British political and cultural responses to the Revolution, and served as the impetus for Büchner's radical formal innovations of the 1830s. Surveying this expanded field of inquiry, Buckley weaves together a coherent formal genealogy of the drama during this period and offers a new, more continuous generic history of modern drama in its first and most turbulent phase of development. [From Publisher]

The book traces a complex history of neoclassicism in which new allegorical forms flourish and older ones are constantly revitalized. Brown reveals the allegorical survivals in the works of such major figures as Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, Vondel, Metastasio, Goethe, and Wagner and reads tragedy, comedy, masque, opera, and school drama together rather than as separate developments. Throughout, she draws illuminating parallels to modes of representation in the visual arts. A work of broad interest to scholars, teachers, and students of theatrical form, The Persistence of Allegory presents a fundamental rethinking of the history of European drama. [From Publisher]

The first book-length study of the relationship between science and theater during the long eighteenth century in Britain, The Theater of Experiment explores the crucial role of spectacle in the establishment of modern science by analyzing how eighteenth-century science was "staged" in a double sense. On the one hand, this study analyzes science in performance: the way that science and scientists were made a public spectacle in comedies, farces, and pantomimes for purposes that could range from the satiric to the pedagogic to the hagiographic. But this book also considers the way in which these plays laid bare science as performance: that is, the way that eighteenth-century science was itself a kind of performing art, subject to regimes of stagecraft that traversed the laboratory, the lecture hall, the anatomy theater, and the public stage. [From Publisher]

In Passing Judgement, Hélène Bilis examines how an overlooked character-type—the royal judge—remained a constant of the tragic genre throughout the 17th century, although the specifics of his role and position fluctuated as playwrights experimented with changing models of sovereignty onstage. Her readings analyze how this royal decision-maker stood at the intersection of political and theatrical debates, and evolved through a process of trial and error in which certain portrayals of kingship were deemed obsolete and were discarded, while others were promoted as culturally allowable and resonant. In tracing the royal judge’s persistent presence and transformation, Bilis argues that we can better grasp the weighty political stakes of theatrical representations under the ancien régime. [From Publisher]