Steele MacKaye (1842-1894) was a major North American theatre artist - a director, actor, inventor, painter, theorist, and writer - best known for advancing a unified vision of pictorial illusionism, the central aesthetic of late nineteenth-century drama, by transforming grand theatres into jewel-boxes for gilded society. Pictorial Illusionism is the first full-length critical study of MacKaye's life's work.

Hollander explores the premise that paintings, prints, and movies move us similarly by virtue of their narrative element, which evokes our memories and feelings. She argues that we respond to the depiction of glimpses of human life, to the realization that we cannot see everything at once, and how the rendering of light and spatial composition translates them and keeps them moving into our awareness. Thus there is a continuum from the paintings and graphic arts of 15th century northern Europe to the "proto-cinematic arts" of the present. ISBN 0-394-57400-1: $29.95.

On the relationship between early cinema and 19th century theatre.

This book presents a new approach to the relationship between traditional pictorial arts and the theatre in Renaissance England. Demonstrating the range of visual culture in evidence from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, from the grandeur of court murals to the cheap amusement of woodcut prints, John H. Astington shows how English drama drew heavily on this imagery to stimulate the imagination of the audience. He analyses the intersection of the theatrical and the visual through such topics as Shakespeare's Roman plays and the contemporary interest in Roman architecture and sculpture; the central myth of Troy and its widely recognised iconography; scriptural drama and biblical illustration; and the emblem of the theatre itself. The book demonstrates how the art that surrounded Shakespeare and his contemporaries had a profound influence on the ways in which theatre was produced and received.

Examining the artistic, intellectual, and social life of performance, this book interrogates Theatre and Performance Studies through the lens of display and modern visual art. Moving beyond the exhibition of immaterial art and its documents, as well as re-enactment in gallery contexts, Guy's book articulates an emerging field of arts practice distinct from but related to increasing curatorial provision for ‘live’ performance. Drawing on a recent proliferation of object-centric events of display that interconnect with theatre, the book approaches artworks in terms of their curation together and re-theorizes the exhibition as a dynamic context in which established traditions of display and performance interact. By examining the current traffic of ideas and aesthetics moving between theatricality and curatorial practice, the study reveals how the reception of a specific form is often mediated via the ontological expectations of another. It asks how contemporary visual arts and exhibition practices display performance and what it means to generalize the ‘theatrical’ as the optic or directive of a curatorial concept. Proposing a symbiotic relation between theatricality and display, Guy presents cases from international arts institutions which are both displayed and performed, including the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, and assesses their significance to the enduring relation between theatre and the visual arts. The book progresses from the conventional alignment of theatricality and ephemerality within performance research and teases out a new temporality for performance with which contemporary exhibitions implicitly experiment, thereby identifying supplementary modes of performance which other discourses exclude. This important study joins the fields of Theatre and Performance Studies with exciting new directions in curation, aesthetics, sociology of the arts, visual arts, the creative industries, the digital humanities, cultural heritage, and reception and audience theories.