Henri Peyre, dean of French scholars in the United States, introduces "The Two Faces of Ionesco" thus: "Rosette Lamont, the shrewdest and most perceptive interpreter of Ioensco in Europe and America, and Melvin Friedman, known in France for his" Confirguation Critique de Samuel Beckett," which was published by The University of Chicago Press as "Samuel Beckett Now," have ingeniously gathered here a series of chapters by diverse hands which illuminate all the conflicting aspects of that enigmatic personality. Their introduction, and Professor Lamont's own essays in this volume, brilliantly written, unravel the thought, the technique and the complexities of Ionesco's work.

Eugene Ioneso's dramas still work in theaters thanks to what some critics call his primordial sense of the foundations of drama. This text examines some of his work, including The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, The Chair, and Rhinoceros

For over a hundred years stories about photographs and photography have reflected the profound uncertainties and inconclusive endings of the modern world. For many writers, photography, supposedly the most realistic of the arts, turns out to be the most ambiguous. As Jane Rabb observes in her introduction, a number of the stories in this collection involve mysteries, perhaps because photography has a capacity for both documentary reality and moral and psychological ambiguity. Many nineteenth-century writers represented here, including Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, helped make short fiction as respectable as the novel. Some of them were even serious photographers themselves. The twentieth century is arguably a golden age for both the short story and photography. This collection includes examples from a worldly group of writer--Eugène Ionesco, Julio Cortá¡zar, Michel Tournier, and Italo Calvino, as well as the Chinese writer Bing Xin and John Updike, Cynthia Ozick, and Raymond Carver. In this wide range of stories, varying from sentimental to obsessive, to sinister, to tragic and even fatal, the reader will find provocative examples of the confluence of the short story and photography, both once considered the bastard stepchildren of literature and art.

Viewing thematic writing as the differentiation and elaboration of cultural knowledge, P. M. Cryle applies this new kind of thematics to the commitment" most often mentioned by literary critics in connection with existentialist literature. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called “Theatre of the Absurd,” this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.

Now available in paperback for the first time, Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century is both a comprehensive reference resource and a springboard for further study. This volume: examines canonical Jewish writers, less well-known authors of Yiddish and Hebrew, and emerging Israeli writers includes entries on figures as diverse as Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Woody Allen contains introductory essays on Jewish-American writing, Holocaust literature and memoirs, Yiddish writing, and Anglo-Jewish literature provides a chronology of twentieth-century Jewish writers. Compiled by expert contributors, this book contains over 330 entries on individual authors, each consisting of a biography, a list of selected publications, a scholarly essay on their work and suggestions for further reading.

Focusing on European tragicomedy from the early modern period to the theatre of the absurd, Verna Foster here argues for the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates human experience differently from the various forms of tragedy, comedy, and the drame (serious drama that is neither comic nor tragic). Foster posits that, in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable new genre, tragicomedy has emerged only twice in the history of drama. She argues that tragicomedy first emerged and was controversial in the Renaissance; and that it has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic genres. In the first section of the book, the author analyzes the name 'tragicomedy' and the genre's problems of identity; then goes on to explore early modern tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. A transitional chapter addresses cognate genres. The final section of the book focuses on modern tragicomedies by Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. By exploring dramaturgical similarities between early modern and modern tragicomedies, Foster demonstrates the persistence of tragicomedy's generic markers and provides a more precise conceptual framework for the genre than has so far been available.

All of the essays in this collection reflect a sense that Beckett's power as a playwright derives largely from a mythic vision that informs his drama. Their approaches to the definition and use of myth and ritual in his plays vary considerably, however, ranging from the Jungian to the Marxian to the Lacanian, and drawing on the theories of Campbell, Freud, Eliade, Frye, Turner, Girard, Baudrillard, and others.

This volume comprises papers presented at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Joachim Wach's death, and the centennial of Mircea Eliade's birth. Its purpose is to reconsider both the problematic, separate legacies of these two major twentieth-century historians of religions, and the bearing of these two legacies upon each other. Shortly after Wach's death in 1955, Eliade succeeded him as the premiere historian of religions at the University of Chicago. As a result, the two have been associated with each other in many people's minds as the successive leaders of the so-called "Chicago School" in the history of religions. In fact, as this volume makes clear, there never was a monolithic Chicago School. Although Wach reportedly referred to Eliade as the most astute historian of religions of the day; the two never met, and their approaches to the study of religions differed significantly. Several dominant issues run through the essays collected here: the relationship between the two men's writings and their lives, and in Eliade's case, the relationship between his political commitments and his writings in fiction, history of religions, and autobiography. Both men's contributions to the field continue to provoke controversy and debate, and this volume sheds new light on these controversies and what they reveal about these two `scholars' legacies.

Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri’s Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.