An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance.
Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks
Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing
Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance
About the Author
W. B. Worthen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of The Idea of the Actor (1984), Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (1992), Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (2003), and Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (2006). He is also the editor of several volumes, including A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance (with Barbara Hodgdon, Wiley-Blackwell 2005), and the Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 5th edition (2006).
Features
An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, which not only teaches students how to read drama, but also explores the key questions that have occupied the earliest playwrights through to today’s most distinguished literary and cultural critics
Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks
Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing
Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance
