Companion To Modern British And Irish Drama: 1880-2005( Series - Blackwell Companions To Literature And Culture )

This "Companion" provides a set of provocative agendas for investigating modern drama. It offers the most comprehensive challenge to existing constructions of the canon and examines in detail the dialogue between developments in Britain and Ireland. Contributors investigate radical postcolonial readings, offer revisionist feminist critiques, and reflect on why certain playwrights have been written in and others written out. Why have certain institutions dominated the constructions of dramatic canons? What role have female playwrights adopted in challenging stage conventions and modes of production? These are among the questions addressed by the "Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama," The volume analyzes a wide range of plays and performance traditions, and explores the political, cultural, economic and institutional frameworks that readers require in order to get to grips with them.

The "Companion" plots continuities and discontinuities, innovations, and resistances to the new. Its authoritative contributions highlight different treatments of realist conventions, investigate anti-realist experiments, and examine representations of war, terrorism, comedy, trauma and sexuality by playwrights from Shaw and Wilde to the present. Contributors also discuss the contending forces that have influenced the construction of the modern dramatic canon, engaging with contemporary discourses that challenge the dominance of London as well as of white English males and realism.

This wide-ranging "Companion to Modern British and Irish Drama" offers challenging analyses of a range of plays in their political contexts. It explores the cultural, social, economic and institutional agendas that readers need to engage with in order to appreciate modern theatre in all its complexity.
An authoritative guide to modern British and Irish drama.
Engages with theoretical discourses challenging a canon that has privileged London as well as white English males and realism.
Topics covered include: national, regional and fringe theatres; post-colonial stages and multiculturalism; feminist and queer theatres; sex and consumerism; technology and globalisation; representations of war, terrorism, and trauma.