This collection of essays examines the contribution of British plays to key social, political, and intellectual debates since 2000. It explores some of the most pressing concerns that have dominated the public discourse in Britain in the last decade, focusing on their representation in dramatic texts. Each essay provides an in-depth analysis of one play, assessing its particular contribution to the debate in question. The book aims to show how contemporary drama has developed unique ways to present the complexities and ambiguities of certain issues with aesthetic as well as emotional appeal.

This collection of essays examines the contribution of British plays to key social, political, and intellectual debates since 2000. It explores some of the most pressing concerns that have dominated the public discourse in Britain in the last decade, focusing on their representation in dramatic texts. Each essay provides an in-depth analysis of one play, assessing its particular contribution to the debate in question. The book aims to show how contemporary drama has developed unique ways to present the complexities and ambiguities of certain issues with aesthetic as well as emotional appeal.

Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Can theatre change the world? If so, how can it productively connect with social reality and foster spectatorial critique and engagement? This open access book examines the forms and functions of political drama in what has been described as a post-Marxist, post-ideological, even post-political moment. It argues that Bertolt Brecht's concept of dialectical theatre represents a privileged theoretical and dramaturgical method on the contemporary British stage as well as a valuable lens for understanding 21st-century theatre in Britain. Establishing a creative philosophical dialogue between Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Rancière, the study analyses seminal works by five influential contemporary playwrights, ranging from Mark Ravenhill's 'in-yer-face' plays to Caryl Churchill's 21st century theatrical experiments. Engaging critically with Brecht's theatrical legacy, these plays create a politically progressive form of drama which emphasises notions of negativity, ambivalence and conflict as a prerequisite for spectatorial engagement and emancipation. This book adopts an interdisciplinary and intercultural theoretical approach, reuniting English and German perspectives and innovatively weaving together a variety of theoretical strands to offer fresh insights on Brecht's legacy, on British theatre history and on the selected plays. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Absent Rebels: Criticism and Network Power in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction focuses on the relationship between literary dystopia, network power and neoliberalism, explaining why rebellion against a dystopian system is absent in so many contemporary dystopian novels. Also, this book helps readers understand modern power mechanisms and shows ways how to overcome them in our own daily lives.

This book revisits In-Yer-Face theatre, an explosive, energetic theatrical movement from the 1990s that introduced the world to playwrights Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, Mark Ravenhill, Jez Butterworth, and many others. Split into three sections the book re-examines the era, considers the movement’s influence on international theatre, and considers its lasting effects on contemporary British theatre. The first section offers new readings on works from that time period (Antony Neilson and Mark Ravenhill) as well as challenges myths created by the Royal Court Theatre about the its involvement with In-Yer-Face theatre. The second section discusses the influence of In-Yer-Face on Portuguese, Russian and Australian theater, while the final section discusses the legacy of In-Yer-Face writers as well as their influences on more recent playwrights, including chapters on Philip Ridley, Sarah Kane, Joe Penhall, Martin Crimp, Dennis Kelly, and Verbatim Drama.

Hailed as one of the most talented playwrights to have emerged in the late 2000s, Mike Bartlett's diverse range of plays strike at the heart of the various crises predominant in the early twenty-first century. Offering the first extensive examination of the plays and television series written by award winning playwright Mike Bartlett, this volume not only provides analysis of some of Bartlett’s best-known works (Cock, Doctor Foster, King Charles III, and Albion), but also includes new interviews with Bartlett and some of his closest and oft relied upon collaborators. In this book, Bartlett’s plays and television series are grouped together thematically, allowing the reader to observe the cross-pollination between his works on the stage and screen. The book also includes an introductory biographical chapter that discusses early influences on his writing (Harold Pinter, Mark Ravenhill, Tony Kushner, and Quentin Tarantino), his time in the Young Writers Programme at the Royal Court, and his work with the Apathists. Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists is a series of innovative and exciting critical introductions to the work of internationally pioneering playwrights, giving undergraduate students an ideal point of entry into these key figures in modern drama.

This volume argues against Gérard Genette’s theory that there is an “insurmountable opposition” between drama and narrative and shows that the two forms of storytelling have been productively intertwined throughout literary history. Building on the idea that plays often incorporate elements from other genres, especially narrative ones, the present study theorises drama as a fundamentally narrative genre. Guided by the question of how drama tells stories, the first part of the study delineates the general characteristics of dramatic narration and zooms in on the use of narrative forms in drama. The second part proposes a history of dramatic storytelling from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century that transcends conventional genre boundaries. Close readings of exemplary British plays provide an overview of the dominant narrative modes in each period and point to their impact in the broader cultural and historical context of the plays. Finally, the volume argues that throughout history, highly narrative plays have had a performative power that reached well beyond the stage: dramatic storytelling not only reflects socio-political realities, but also largely shapes them.

Über die Epochen hinweg haben sich literarische Werke und Genres explizit oder implizit mit dem Kapitalismus auseinandergesetzt. Doch gerade die vergangenen Jahrzehnte, in welchen der Kapitalismus nach Mark Fisher zum ausweglosen Vorstellungshorizont avanciert ist, zeugen von einer vermehrten Infragestellung des Kapitalismus in der literarischen Produktion sowie der Literaturwissenschaft. Vor diesem Hintergrund vereint der interdisziplinäre Sammelband Beiträge aus der Germanistik, Romanistik, Amerikanistik und Anglistik, die den Blick auf verschiedene zeitgenössische Manifestationen des globalen Kapitalismus und deren literarische oder filmische Repräsentationen richten.

'Edward Bond: Bondian Drama and Young Audience' focuses on one of the most influential playwrights of Britain, Edward Bond, and his plays for young audiences. The chapters examine the theatrical and pedagogical prospects of the plays on young people which have been mostly staged since 1990s, throughout the globe. The issues covered in this book involve interdisciplinary studies such as theatre, pedagogy, ethics, children, culture, politics, among others. These topics have crucial importance for the production of plays for young audiences. Apart from this, the book focuses on Bondian Drama and its relation with the dramatic child, involving most of his plays for young audiences. The authors in this volume examine theatrical and pedagogical backgrounds of the plays, discussing critical issues, by questioning the specialities of Bondian drama and present future implications of this for young audiences. This volume presents substantial and elaborate information on crucial issues, and enable detailed discussions from various perspectives on theatre.