In this impressively wide-ranging study of all drama written in German in the period 1945-1977, Christopher Innes' aims are to identify the concerns and perceptions of dramatists working in a specific and unique social context and period and to analyse the major theatrical forms they developed or adapted to express their experience, to trace the writers' literary antecedents, their 'tradition' and to explore the critical issues raised by each stylistic innovation. Professor Innes has organized his discussion around the main forms of theatre - epic, documentary, absurdist and more traditional forms. Redefining these conceptual labels as he progresses, he analyses, in a critical and informed way, the work on the page and the stage of all the major playwrights. This study, which is complemented by photographs of key productions and accompanied by translations for all quotations, will be of particular interest to teachers and students of drama and German, as well as to a wider theatre-going public.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.

This collection of articles by both German literature specialists and German theater experts grew out of the Comparative Drama Conference held annually between February and March from 1977 to 1999 in Gainesville, Florida. At the center of the contributors' work is the productive tension between the literary and the performance aspects of German drama and theater. At the same time, the reception is truly American, since the German playwrights, directors, theorists, and dramatists discussed have gone through creative filters in the researching, performing, and teaching of German drama and theater on various campuses across the United States during the last third of the twentieth century.