The Leading eBooks Store Online
for your Apple or Android device, Nook, Kobo, PC, Mac, Sony Reader...
Most popular at the top
The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Volume 5 Asia/Pacificby Don Rubin
Routledge 2001; US$ 78.00An indispensable reference tool for all theatre scholars and students, this book surveys theatre in more than 30 countries from India to Thailand, from Uzbekistan to New Zealand and from Australia to China, and is lavishly illustrated throughout. more...
Not in Front of the Audienceby Nicholas De Jongh
Taylor & Francis 1992; US$ 35.95A pioneering study of the theatre's treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality from the 1920s to the present day. Only in the 60s did theatres confront heterosexual prejudice and in the wake of AIDS, the issue is once again highly charged. more...
Rhetoricby Wendy Olmsted
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 2008; US$ 104.95This introduction to the art of rhetoric analyzes rhetorical concepts, problems, and methods and teaches practical inquiry through a series of classic rhetorical texts. An introduction to the art of rhetoric for those who are unacquainted with it and an argument about invention and tradition suitable for specialists Texts range from Cicero's De oratore and Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine to Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions Texts serve simultaneously as works of persuasion and considerations of how rhetoric works Engages readers in using rhetoric to deliberate about challenging issues. more...
Theater Im Aufbruchby Roger Lüdeke; Virginia Richter
Walter de Gruyter, Inc. 2008; US$ 115.00In the transition to the Early Modern Age, drama forms the dominant genre. With its speed of production and its position between the written and the oral, between the urban entertainment industry and courtly representation, drama is the text type best suited to dealing with the social, religious and political tensions of the age. This collected volume provides an overview of the English, French, Spanish and German variants of drama in the Early Modern Age, from the religious plays of the Middle Ages to the engagement with classics of the European Renaissance in the Romantic Age. more...
How Plays Workby Martin Meisel
Oxford University Press, UK 2007; US$ 45.00Martin Meisel's engaging book looks at how we read plays on the page. Cultivated in tone and jargon-free, his incisive account is illuminated by dozens of judiciously chosen examples from western drama - from classical Greek dramatists to contemporary playwrights, both canonical and relatively obscure. How Plays Work will appeal as much to the serious student of the theatre as to the playgoer who likes to read a play before seeing it performed. - ;Why are readers who are generally at home with narrative and discursive prose, and even readily responsive to poetry, far less confident and intuitive when it comes to plays? The complication lies in the twofold character of the play as it exists on the page - as a script or score to be realized,... more...
Apuleius and Dramaby Regine May
Oxford University Press, UK 2006; US$ 140.00An exploration of the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. All Latin and Greek is translated into English. - ;Regine May discusses the use of drama as an intertext in the work of the 2nd century Latin author Apuleius, who wrote the only complete extant Latin novel, the Metamorphoses, in which a young man is turned into a donkey by magic. Apuleius uses drama, especially comedy, as a basic underlying texture, and invites his readers to use their knowledge of contemporary drama in interpreting the fate of his protagonist and the often comic or tragic situations in which he finds.... more...
The Theatre of the Absurdby Martin Esslin
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group 2009; US$ 13.99In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition. Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s... more...
The Vital Lieby Anthony S. Abbott
The University of Alabama Press 2009; US$ 30.00The Vital Lie is the first book to examine the reality-illusion conflict in modern drama from Ibsen to present-day playwrights. The book questions why vital lies, lies necessary for life itself, are such an obsessive concern for playwrights of the last hundred years. Using the work of fifteen playwrights, Abbott seeks to discover if modern playwrights treat illusions as helpful or necessary to life, or as signals of sicknesses from which human beings need to be cured. What happens to characters when they are forced to face the truth about themselves and their worlds without the protection of their illusions? The author develops a three-part historical analysis of the use of the reality-illusion theme, from its... more...
The Drama of Ideasby Martin Puchner
Oxford University Press, USA 2010; US$ 29.95Most philosophy makes little mention of the theater except to denounce it as a place of illusion and moral decay. The theater has tended to respond in kind by steering away from philosophy, driven by the notion that theater consists of actions, not ideas. The Drama of Ideas argues that despite this mutual evasion, the histories of philosophy and theater have in fact been crucially intertwined. Appointing Plato as a hinge figure, Puchner traces this alternative tradition as well as recounting the long-standing philosophical register in drama and philosophy's more recent theatrical shift. Moving from a consideration of Plato as a dramatist to those Renaissance playwrights who drew on Plato's chief character, Socrates, Puchner articulates... more...
Integral Dramaby William S. Haney
Editions Rodopi 2008; US$ 51.80Integral Drama critically explores modern drama in the context of Indian aesthetics described in the Natyashastra and the vast, new interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies. It also focuses on how Indian theatre aesthetics has influenced modern drama theories and practice, and the extent to which this has promoted the development of higher consciousness in actors and audience. According to Indian aesthetics, rasa or aesthetic rapture is refers to bliss innate in the Self that manifests even in the absence of external sources of happiness. Overall, this book explores the relation between modern theatre and higher states of mind and demonstrates that one of the key purposes of theatre is to help the spectator experience the pure consciousness... more...









