The Hbj Anthology Of Drama

Representing the largest expansion between editions, this updated volume of Ottemiller's Index to Plays in Collections is the standard location tool for full-length plays published in collections and anthologies in England and the United States throughout the 20th century and beyond. This new volume lists more than 3,500 new plays and 2,000 new authors, as well as birth and/or death information for hundreds of authors.

This book explores the themes of colonial encounters and postcolonial contests over identity, power and culture through the prism of theatre. The struggles it describes unfolded in two cultural settings separated by geography, but bound by history in a common web of colonial relations spun by the imperatives of European modernity. In post-imperial England, as in its former colony Nigeria, the colonial experience not only hybridized the process of national self-definition, but also provided dramatists with the language, imagery and frame of reference to narrate the dynamics of internal wars over culture and national destiny happening within their own societies. The author examines the works of prominent twentieth-century Nigerian and English dramatists such as Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Davd Edgar and Caryl Churchill to argue that dramaturgies of resistance in the contexts of both Nigerian as well as its imperial inventor England, shared a common allegiance to what he describes as postcolonial desires. That is, the aspiration to overcome the legacies of colonialism by imagining alternative universes anchored in democratic cultural pluralism. The plays and their histories serve as filters through which Ampka illustrates the operation of what he calls 'overlapping modernities' and reconfigures the notions of power and representation, citizenship and subjectivity, colonial and anticolonial nationalisms and postcoloniality. The dramatic works studied in this book embodied a version of postcolonial aspirations that the author conceptualises as transcending temporal locations to encompass varied moments of consciousness for progressive change, whether they happened during the hey day of English imperialism in early twentieth-century Nigeria, or in response to the exclusionary politics of the Conservative Party in Thatcherite England. Theatre and Postcolonial Desires will be essential reading for students and researchers in the areas of drama, postcolonial and cultural studies.

Reclaiming Our Brains without Losing Our Minds relates the story of a group of women in the mid-sized town of Yakima, Washington, who form a reading group in dedicated pursuit of “the best that has been thought and said” in literature. Over the course of twenty-nine years, the women hone their minds, exchange ideas, and discover a sense of closeness and community that extends beyond the page. Featuring detailed accounts of the recruitment process, strategies for meetings, and the methods of choosing the featured texts, this book is a vital tool for anyone interested in starting a reading group or rekindling a love of literature.

This annotated bibliography constitutes a thoroughly revised and more easily readable study of Behn's publications, of those edited or translated by her, of publications that included her works, and of writings ascribed to her, along with an annotated bibliography of over 1600 works about her from 1671 to 2001, with an unannotated update covering 2002. The augmented primary bibliography describes all known editions and issues of her works to 1702, and adds a catalogue of editions to 2002, including on-line sources. The secondary bibliography adds close to 1000 items published since 1984 to the original 600 of the first edition along with about 175 more from 1671 to 1984, with attention to materials not in English. New appendices include a list of dedicatees, actors, recent productions (with reviews), and provenances. This volume will be invaluable for book dealers, collectors and librarians, as well as students and scholars of Aphra Behn and of Restoration literature.

Strindberg on International Stages and Strindberg in Translation is a collection of scholarly and critical articles looking upon Strindberg from different perspectives. Three articles are case studies about Strindberg performances in different countries: namely, the United States, Italy and Portugal. Three further articles approach the problems of the transformation of the text on the stage. One of these essays is based on Strindberg’s texts about drama from an aesthetical point of view; another from the perspective of a Strindberg director; and the third provides an analysis of the postdramatic performances of a Swedish suburban theatre group. This postdramatic aspect is also important in one of the contributions providing an analysis of Strindberg’s Chamber Plays, which is followed by an article where the function of music in particular is reflected upon. Translation problems are important in all the countries discussed in this volume, especially Portugal, and the fact that Strindberg wrote his plays in different languages during different periods of his life raises important questions such as: if there is no indisputable first text, what is a translation? Where do we draw the line between a translation and an adaptation? How does the idea of translation change over time? One article in this collection revolves around such questions. In the final section of this volume, readers are introduced to the digital Stockholm University Strindberg Corpus, consisting of seven of Strindberg’s autobiographical works with linguistic annotation. The authors in this section describe the novels included in the corpus by keywords, and compare Strindberg’s use of emotionally charged words with selected prose of both his contemporaries and present-day authors. These ten articles read together pose the most relevant questions with regard to Strindberg performances and Strindberg translations, and will be of interest to modern Strindberg scholars, Strindberg enthusiasts and Strindberg directors.

At a time when Asian American theater is enjoying a measure of growth and success, Josephine Lee tells us about the complex social and political issues depicted by Asian American playwrights. By looking at performances and dramatic texts, Lee argues that playwrights produce a different conception of "Asian America" in accordance with their unique set of sensibilities. For instance, some Asian American playwrights critique the separation of issues of race and ethnicity from those of economics and class, or they see ethnic identity as a voluntary choice of lifestyle rather than an impetus for concerted political action. Others deal with the problem of cultural stereotypes and how to reappropriate their power. Lee is attuned to the complexities and contradictions of such performances, and her trenchant thinking about the criticisms lobbed at Asian American playwrights -- for their choices in form, perpetuation of stereotype, or apparent sexism or homophobia -- leads her to question how the presentation of Asian American identity in the theater parallels problems and possibilities of identity offstage as well. Discussed are better-known plays such as Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman, David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, and Velina Hasu Houston's Tea, and new works like Jeannie Barroga's Walls and Wakako Yamauchi's 12-1-a.