Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater
Regular price
€42.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=W. B. Worthen
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
american drama
audience
Author_W. B. Worthen
automatic-update
brecht
british drama
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AN
Category=ATD
Category=CFG
Category=DSBH
Category=DSG
COP=United States
Delivery_Pre-order
drama
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Language_English
literary criticism
modern theater
oneill
PA=Temporarily unavailable
performance
performing arts
plays
playwright
poetic theater
political theater
postwar drama
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
realistic theater
rhetoric
softlaunch
spectator
stage
stage drama
stage production
staging
theater
theater criticism
theater history
yeats
Product details
- ISBN 9780520286870
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jan 2015
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The history of drama is typically viewed as a series of inert "styles." Tracing British and American stage drama from the 1880s onward, W. B. Worthen instead sees drama as the interplay of text, stage production, and audience. How are audiences manipulated? What makes drama meaningful? Worthen identifies three rhetorical strategies that distinguish an O'Neill play from a Yeats, or these two from a Brecht. Where realistic theater relies on the "natural" qualities of the stage scene, poetic theater uses the poet's word, the text, to control performance. Modern political theater, by contrast, openly places the audience at the center of its rhetorical designs, and the drama of the postwar period is shown to develop a range of post-Brechtian practices that make the audience the subject of the play. Worthen's book deserves the attention of any literary critic or serious theatergoer interested in the relationship between modern drama and the spectator.
W. B. Worthen is Alice Brady Pels Professor in the Arts, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University; he also serves as Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and as co-chair of the Ph.D. in Theatre Program.
