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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceana, and South America.

Showing posts with label theater studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theater studies. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

BOOK NEWS: Listening to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio theater

 Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein's Parlor Plays

by Adam J. Frank



Northwestern UP, 2024

ISBN: 9780810148062

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810148062/radio-free-stein/


What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

"With dazzling online recordings and scripts, Radio Free Stein takes readers backstage to reveal the inventive workshop process Adam Frank has used in productions of Gertrude Stein’s early voice plays. The 1934 NBC radio interview Stein gave on her US tour resonated with her playwriting “by making audience available as feeling” and Frank brilliantly renders this insight in productions that capture the plays’ strange and arresting illocutionary force."—Linda Voris, American University

Radio Free Stein’s fluent roving across considerations of performance, psychoanalytic theorization of the radio, and philosophical and queer theories of the performative is brilliant and compelling. This is a significant contribution to both Stein studies and modern theater studies, as well as media and modernist studies.”—E. L. McCallum, Michigan State University


ADAM J. FRANK is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com.

Thursday, November 9, 2023

BOOK NEWS: Interviews with Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally

Conversations with Terrence McNally

EDITED BY RAYMOND-JEAN FRONTAIN



UP of Mississippi

ISBN: 9781496843227

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Terrence-McNally


Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

"Important and outstanding.... This highly recommended collection will be an essential addition to all libraries with theater collections." - Herbert E. Shapiro, Library Journal

 

Raymond-Jean Frontain is an independent scholar who has published eight books and over 100 scholarly articles on the Bible as literature, gay literature, Renaissance poetry, the Indian novel, and modern drama. His previous works on Terrence McNally include The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater, Muse of Fire (2021). He is currently at work on a study of Tennessee Williams’s sexual ethic.

Friday, December 2, 2022

Book News: Risk as the crux of theatre

When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre: Three Tragedies and Six Essays

BY EDWIN WONG



Friesen Press, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-03-913509-3 

https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000213016212/Edwin-Wong%2C-Gabriel-Jason-Dean-and-Nicholas-Dunn-%26-Emily-McClain-When-Life-Gives-You-Risk%2C-Make-Risk-Theatre


Wong’s first book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Inside you will find three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason Dean), The Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain). From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offices lining interstate expressways, these plays, by simulating risk, show how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.

Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory. After risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.


Edwin Wong is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network, the Canadian Association of Theatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. His first book, The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy, is igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria, Canada.

Thursday, August 12, 2021

Book News: Exploring Flann O'Brien's dark comedy

 Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour

EDITED BY RUBEN BORG AND PAUL FAGAN



Cork University Press, 2020

ISBN: 9781782054214

https://www.corkuniversitypress.com/Flann-O-Brien-p/9781782054214.htm


The essays collected in this volume draw unprecedented critical attention to the centrality of politics in Flann O’Brien’s art. The organizing theme of Gallows Humour focuses these inquiries onto key encounters between the body and the law, between death and the comic spirit in the author’s canon. These innovative analyses explore the place of biopolitics in O’Brien’s modernist experimentation and popular writing through reflections on his handling of the thematics of violence, justice, capital punishment, eugenics, prosthetics, skin, prostitution, syphilis, rape, reproduction, illness, auto-immune deficiency, abjection, drinking, Gaelic games, and masculinist nationalism across a diverse range of genres, intertexts, contexts.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Ruben Borg is associate professor and chair of the department of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to Gallows Humour, he co-edited two volumes on Flann O’Brien for Cork University Press: Contesting Legacies (with Paul Fagan and Werner Huber: 2014), and Problems with Authority (with Paul Fagan and John McCourt: 2017).

Paul Fagan is senior scientist at Salzburg University, as well as a lecturer at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theories Summer School. As well as co-editing the Cork University Press collections Flann O’Brien: Contesting Legacies (2014) and Flann O’Brien: Problems with Authority (2017), Fagan is a co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and is presently completing a monograph on the Irish Literary Hoax Tradition.



Thursday, January 14, 2021

Book News: Dublin's post-independence theatre scene

 

Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940

BY RUUD VAN DEN BEUKEN 


Syracuse UP, January 2021

Paper ISBN: 9780815636434

Hardcover ISBN: 9780815636250

https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/3470/avant-garde-nationalism-at-the-dublin-gate-theatre-1928-1940/


A new generation of Irish playwrights set out to establish Dublin as a modern European capital by staging radical productions at the Dublin Gate Theatre.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do not constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.


"Offers an invaluable tool for advancing knowledge in the fields of drama, performance, and Irish studies with its close attention to the underexamined institution of the Gate Theatre. . . . This book will make a significant and long-lasting impact in Irish studies, theatre studies, and accounts of mid-century modernism."  —Paige Reynolds, author of Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle


"For many years, the accepted story of Irish theatre was that the Abbey was the writers’ theatre, and its rival, the Gate, was primarily a producing house. Making use of newly available archival sources, Ruud van den Beuken turns the old story on its head, and in so doing forces us to rethink Irish theatre. This book demands our attention."  —Christopher Morash, Trinity College Dublin


Ruud van den Beuken is assistant professor of English literature at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He was awarded the 2015 Irish Society for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize.