Modern and Contemporary World Drama

Bringing together 70 major critical articles across four volumes, Modern and Contemporary World Drama: Critical and Primary Sources collects scholarly articles, reviews and critical interventions that are indispensable to anyone wishing to gain an understanding of world drama from the past 150 years. Contesting a Eurocentric reading or history of modern drama, the articles underscore the importance of migration and transnational movements of dramatic forms, and place emphasis on the transmission and circulation of dramatic theories around the world. Modern drama is revealed as a worldwide phenomenon in which a diverse array of artists and writers participated and in which modernism is seen to have affected all parts of the world in ways that are much more complex and multi-directional than what has been assumed in Eurocentric models. The four volumes are arranged both thematically and chronologically to give readers a sense of how world modern and contemporary drama began and how it has been studied in the past 150 years. Volume 1: Beginnings This volume includes essays that describe various beginnings of modern drama. Instead of identifying a singular origin of modern drama with a linear chronology, the volume suggests multidirectional and multidimensional beginnings. The geographical area covered in the volume is extensive, and each essay describes different ways to conceptualize time, chronology, and what would be considered innovative in dramatic writing. Volume 2: Theories This volume includes essays that address theoretical questions of modern and contemporary world drama. In many ways, modern drama around the world began as a theoretical endeavor that questioned the fundamentals of the dramatic form. Like the first volume, the second illustrates an array of studies that challenge a singular interpretation of modern and contemporary drama. Many of the essays provide practical applications of dramatic theories, and all of them situate the core analysis in historically and politically specific contexts, and the volume questions what theory means to lived experiences in the era of globalization. Volume 3: Movements This volume includes themes of migration, exchange, national borders, exile, and diaspora, and the theatrical stage is often used as a laboratory to examine key issues of globalization and displacement. The volume also examines other definitions of "movements," including political and aesthetic movements that have determined the development of modern and contemporary drama. Like the first two volumes, the third volume prioritizes studies that emphasize the complexities of the global and cosmopolitan experience and refuses to arrive at a narrative with a singular or universal perspective. Volume 4: Twenty-First Century This volume continues many topics raised in the first three volumes and considers how the new millennium has affected the development of modern and contemporary world drama. The essays in the volume examine various developments that are commonly described with the prefix "post," as in posthumanism, post-truth, postcolonial, postrace, and post-nation. A number of the essays concern uncertainties around the future of humanity in the age of technological advancements and late capitalism.