A witty, erudite celebration of fifty great Italian cultural achievements that have significantly influenced Western civilization from the authors of What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? “Sprezzatura,” or the art of effortless mastery, was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. No one has demonstrated effortless mastery throughout history quite like the Italians. From the Roman calendar and the creator of the modern orchestra (Claudio Monteverdi) to the beginnings of ballet and the creator of modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), Sprezzatura highlights fifty great Italian cultural achievements in a series of fifty information-packed essays in chronological order.

A history of Italian theatre from its origins to the the time of this book's publication in 2006. The text discusses the impact of all the elements and figures integral to the collaborative process of theatre-making. The distinctive nature of Italian theatre is expressed in the individual chapters by highly regarded international scholars.

A history of the Italian-American operatic, dramatic, and comedic productions presented in the San Francisco Bay area through the Depression Era, with reminiscences of the leading players and impresarios of the time, reworked and re-edited by Mary A. Burgess from the Federal Writers Project production of 1939.

This volume of Twentieth-Century Italian Drama covers the period spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to that immediately following World War II, displaying the rich breadth of Italian theater in the modern age, from the comedic legacy carried on by such writers as Eduardo De Filippo to the delicate tragedy of playwrights like Federigo Tozzi.Included are seven full-length plays, five one-act plays, one variety sketch, and three futurist sintesi (sketches). Brief introductions preceding each play contextualize the piece within the various movements in Italian theater, and biographies of the editors and translators appear at the end of the volume. An extensive bibliography offers many suggestions for further reading in English.The playwrights included are Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ettore Petrolini, Raffaele Viviani, Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, Federigo Tozzi, Massimo Bontempelli, Achille Campanile, Italo Svevo, Luigi Pirandello, Eduardo De Filippo, and Ugo Betti.

A wide-ranging set of essays that explain what theatre history is and why we need to engage with it.

First Published in 1993. Contemporary Theatre Studies is a book series of special interest to everyone involved in theatre. This collection of documents is the first attempt in English to bring together a body of material on Luigi Pirandello as multi-faceted man of the theatre. Because relatively few of his works have been easily available to English language readers, he is thought of most frequently as a playwright, the author of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV in particular, and his contribution to theatre, both in theory and in practice, has tended to be overlooked. Emphasising his role as a director, the book traces the rise and fall of his own theatre company, the Teatro d’Arte where he struggled to instil new practices and comments on Pirandello’s attempts during the years of Fascism to give Italy a national theatre in a European context.

Much recent writing about Asian societies and Asian Histories adopts a homogenising vision of humanity. It views the definition of cultural difference as an 'Orientalist' project serving colonial or neo-colonial purposes. This unusual collection of essays, written by leading specialists in a range of disciplines. re-appraises and expands the 'Orientalism' debate. Several authors examine the ways in which the Asian 'other' acts as a creative stimulus for the European artist, composer and playwright. The work of Monet, Debussy and Brecht, for instance, is explored to suggest a subtle and complex circulation of idea between the 'Orient' and the 'West'. Other essays investigate the scholar’s own encounter with the exotic, in particular they ask to what extent Western concepts and categories can be used in the analysis of Asian societies and cultures. Among the concepts considered are 'space' (in Chinese art); 'landscape', 'high art', 'low art' and 'opera' (in Indonesia) and 'tragedy', the 'book', concert music' and 'subjectivity' (in Japan). Furthermore, the implications of orality and literacy are examined in the case of Malay society. Like discredited orientalists, the authors of this volume are in most cases based in the West- in universities in Europe, United Sates and Australia- but their investigations are not grounded in confident assumptions about Western power and civilisation. Recovering the Orient probes the Asian 'other' at a time of conceptual uncertainty, when foundational tenets of Western civilisation have come under question.