Books in the What is Theatre? series

From oral culture, through the advent of literacy, to the introduction of printing, to the development of electronic media, communication structures have radically altered culture in profound ways.

Looking at a century of American theatre, McDaniel investigates how race-based notions of maternal performance become sites of resistance to cultural and political hierarchies. This book considers how the construction of mothering as universally women's work obscures additional, equally constructed subdivisions based in race and class.

This ground-breaking collection focuses on how theatre, dance, and other forms of performance are helping to transform our ecological values. Top scholars explore how familiar and new works of performance can help us recognize our reciprocal relationship with the natural world and how it helps us understand the way we are connected to the land.

How has the media since the First Gulf War altered political analysis and how has this alteration has in turn affected socially-critical art? Colleran examines more than forty plays, many written in direct response to the 1991 war in Iraq as well as to the 9/11 attacks and the retaliatory actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A historical, theoretical, and comparative study of the emergence of the director-as-author phenomenon, posing questions of authorship and redefining the relationship between 'playwright' and the director-playwright.

Thomas Fahy examines the integration of and challenges to popular culture found in the theatrical works of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, which have largely been marginalized in discussions of theatre history and literary studies, despite offering a hybrid theatre that integrates popular with formal, and mainstream with experimental

This book explores the way in which doubling takes place in several novels, films, and dramas, primarily focusing on modern drama and exploring how five Greek myths - Oedipus, Narcissus, Dionysus, Orestes, and Demeter - inform the literature.

By concentrating on Sam Shepard's visual aesthetics, Emma Creedon argues that a consideration of Shepard's plays in the context of visual and theoretical Surrealism illuminates our understanding of his experimental approach to drama.