Contents: Introduction: New Tragedy and Comedy; The Background: From^R La Machine infernale to Huis clos; More Sartre and Camus: Drama, Tragedy and Philosophy; Henry de Montherlant: Tragedy and Morality; Samuel Beckett: New Tragedy; EugÈne Ionesco: New Comedy; Arthur Adamov: Black Satire, Dreams and Politics; Jean Genet: Tragic Masquerades; Fernando Arrabal: Tragic Farce; Conclusion: The Death of Comody?; Select Bibliography; Index
In this social history of Europe's most famous city during its golden age, Mansel tells the story of the political turbulence, dynamic intrigue, violence in the streets, and the societal wars that took place in upper-class salons. 32 page photo insert.
In The Living Prism Eva Kushner provides a lively panorama of reflections and experiences in comparative literature studies, showing that comparative literature in the post-World War II era has been an experimental ground for the human sciences.
Linked by their common setting in Thebes, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus stand at the fountainhead of world drama. This volume presents a new, and accurate yet poetic and playable translation by playwright Don Taylor, who has also directed plays for a BBC-TV production.
Linked by their common setting in Thebes, Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus stand at the fountainhead of world drama. This volume presents a new, and accurate yet poetic and playable translation by playwright Don Taylor, who has also directed plays for a BBC-TV production.
This provocative and unique work reveals the remarkably influential role of futuristic literature on contemporary political power in America. Tracing this phenomenon from its roots in Victorian Britain, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines offers a fascinating exploration of how fictional speculations on emergent or imaginary military technologies profoundly influence the political agendas and actions of modern superpower states. Gannon convincingly demonstrates that military fiction anticipated and even influenced the evolution of the tank, the development of the airplane, and also the bitter political battles within Britain's War Office and the Admiralty. In the United States, future-fictions and Cold-War thrillers were an officially acknowledged factor in the Pentagon's research and development agendas, and often gave rise_and shape_to the nation's strategic development of technologies as diverse as automation, atomic weaponry, aerospace vehicles, and the Strategic Defense Initiative ('Star Wars'). His book reveals a striking relationship between the increasing political influence of speculative military fiction and the parallel rise of superpower states and their technocentric ideologies. With its detailed political, historical, and literary analysis of U.S. and British fascination with hi-tech warfare, this lively and revealing study will appeal to students, literary and cultural scholars, military and history enthusiasts, and general readers.
This book celebrates the work and career of the internationally renowned art historian, David Bindman, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and is above all a tribute to him from his former students and colleagues.
While James Joyce was a central figure of high modernism, Malcom Lowry spoke for the next generation of modernist writers and, despite his denials, was almost certainly influenced by Joyce. Wherever the truth lies, there are correspondences and differences to be explored between Joyce and Lowry that are far more interesting than the question of direct influence. Despite numerous differences, their works have much in common: verbal richness, experimentation with narrative structure and perspective, a fascination with cultural and historical forces as well as with the process of artistic creation, and the inclusion of artist figures who are in varying degrees ironic self-portrayals. The contributors to Joyce/Lowry examine the relationship of these two expatriates writers, both to each other and to broader issues in the study of literary modernism and its aftermath. This collection embraces a variety of approaches. The volume begins with a consideration of Joyce and Lowry as practitioners of Expressionist art and concludes with an essay on John Huston's cinematic interpretation of works by both writers. In between are explorations of nationalism, anti-Semitism, syphilis, mental illness, and authorial design.
In The Guernica Bull, Harry C. Rutledge examines the use of classical motifs in twentieth-century literature, art, and drama. From the echoes of Plato's dialogues at the heart of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice to the retelling of the story of Harmodius and Aristogiton--a story with grim parallels to Nazi Germany--in Marguerite Yourcenar's Léna, these modern works are a testament to both the creativity of modern artists and the versatility and timelessness of classical themes. Rutledge finds the ideal meshing of classical images and modern sensibility in Pablo Picasso's Guernica. The most startling classical image in the painting is the bull, a Cubist face staring out from the canvas at the viewer, unmoved by the scene of death and destruction around him. A symbol of the intense violence and disorder which has characterized this century, Picasso's Minoan bull is, at the same time, a symbol of creative potency and artistic achievement. The classical tradition in our era is, Rutledge suggests, multi-faceted, much like the Cubist paintings which view human beings as if through a prism, in all their infinite variety and beauty. The legacy of the Greeks and Romans is both stimulus and resource for modern artists, as evidenced by the meticulous historical reconstruction in Yourcenar's Mémoires d'Hadrien, the recreation of an ancient setting in modern terms in Jean Cocteau's The Infernal Machine and T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion, and the influence of classical monuments and landscapes in the poetry of Frederick Nicklaus, James Dickey, and Richard Wilbur. Modern artists have often found an affinity between themselves and the ancients. In the Greek and Roman works that, through their clarity and brevity, have transcended time and place, contemporary writers and painters perceive the essence of the infinite, which is the challenge in any artistic endeavor. Showing how some modernists have met this challenge, The Guernica Bull explores the ancient antecedents of several of the most distinctive twentieth-century masterpieces.
The book reveals how the fantastic is used in modern theatre as a manipulative device to encode the unspeakable and control audience response, challenging conventional readings of all authors who use the fantastic.
