Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources

Abstract

Bringing together over 80 major critical articles across four volumes, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources collects scholarly articles, reviews and critical interventions that are indispensable to anyone wishing to gain an understanding of world drama from the past 150 years. Contesting a Eurocentric reading or history of modern drama, the articles underscore the importance of migration and transnational movements of dramatic forms, and place emphasis on the transmission and circulation of dramatic theories around the world. Modern drama is revealed as a worldwide phenomenon in which a diverse array of artists and writers participated and in which modernism is seen to have affected all parts of the world in ways that are much more complex and multi-directional than what has been assumed in Eurocentric models. The four volumes are arranged both thematically and chronologically to give readers a sense of how world modern and contemporary drama began and how it has been studied in the past 150 years. This volume includes themes of migration, exchange, national borders, exile, and diaspora, and the theatrical stage is often used as a laboratory to examine key issues of globalization and displacement. The volume also examines other definitions of "movements," including political and aesthetic movements that have determined the development of modern and contemporary drama. Like the first two volumes, the third volume prioritizes studies that emphasize the complexities of the global and cosmopolitan experience and refuses to arrive at a narrative with a singular or universal perspective.