History of European Drama and Theatre / Edition 1

by Erika Fischer-Lichte, Jo Riley

Overview

This major study reconstructs the vast history of European drama from Greek tragedy through to twentieth-century theatre, focusing on the subject of identity. Throughout history, drama has performed and represented political, religious, national, ethnic, class-related, gendered, and individual concepts of identity.

Erika Fischer-Lichte's topics include:

* ancient Greek theatre
* Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre by Corneilli, Racine, Molière
* the Italian commedia dell'arte and its transformations into eighteenth-century drama
* the German Enlightenment - Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, and Lenz
* romanticism by Kleist, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, de Vigny, Musset, Büchner, and Nestroy
* the turn of the century - Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Stanislavski
* the twentieth century - Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, O'Neill, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Müller.

Anyone interested in theatre throughout history and today will find this an invaluable source of information.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415180597
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/29/2001
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Erika Fischer-Lichte is university professor of theatre research at the Free University of Berlin, and president of the International Federation of Theatre Research. Her numerous publications include The Show and the Gaze of Theatre. A European Perspective, 1997.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Chapter 1 Ritual theatre; Chapter 2 Theatrum vitae humanae; Chapter 3 The rise of the middle classes and the theatre of illusion; Chapter 4 Dramatising the identity crisis; Chapter 5 Theatre of the ‘new’ man;

Editorial Reviews

This book deserves a place on the shelf between Felicia Hardison Londr and Daniel J. Watermeier's The History of North American Theater (LJ 9/1/98) and the latest edition of Franklin G. Hildy and Oscar Gross Brockett's History of the Theatre (Allyn & Bacon, 1998. 8th ed.). No other book currently available in English comes close to presenting the information contained here in as comprehensive a fashion. Fischer-Lichte (theater research, Free Univ. of Berlin) has written a complex history of theater, arguing that "every change to the structure of the drama has carried out a correlative change in the concept of identity," examining this concept from the theater of the ancient Greeks up to the 20th century. The major drawback to this publication, as it was received, is its presentation of two columns of type to the page, making the text exceedingly dense. The bibliography draws heavily from French- and German-language sources, and most of the sources date from no later than the mid-1980s. Still, this is an excellent resource. Highly recommended for academic libraries and for any collection serving patrons with a deep interest in theater. (Index not seen.) Larry Schwartz, Minnesota State Univ. Lib., Moorhead Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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