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Rethinking Character in Contemporary British Theatre

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CDE STUDIES (GENERAL EDITOR: ANETTE PANKRATZ) The book series is dedicated to contemporary anglophone playwrights and the analysis of the historical, political and aesthetic contexts of their work, thus seeking to advance the theoretical and...
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  • 29 October 2015
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The category of theatrical character has been swiftly dismissed in the academic reception of no-longer-dramatic texts and performances. However, claims on the dissolution of character narrowly demarcate what a subject is and how it may appear. This volume unmoors theatre scholarship from the regulatory ideals of liberal humanism, stretching the notion of character to encompass and illuminate otherwise unaccounted-for subjects, aesthetic strategies and political gestures in recent theatre works. To this aim, contemporary philosophical theories of subjectivation, European theatre studies, and experimental, script-led work produced in Britain since the late 1990s are mobilised as discussants on the question of subjectivity. Four contemporary playtexts and their performances are examined in depth: Sarah Kane’s Crave and 4.48 Psychosis, Ed Thomas’s Stone City Blue and Tim Crouch’s ENGLAND. Through these case studies, Delgado-García demonstrates alternative ways of engaging theoretically with character, and elucidating a range of subjective figures beyond identity and individuality. Alongside these analyses, the book traces a large body of work that has experimented with speech attribution since the early twentieth-century. This is a timely contribution to contemporary theatre scholarship, which demonstrates that character remains a malleable and politically-salient notion in which understandings of subjectivity are still being negotiated.

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Price: $128.99
Pages: 240
Publisher: De Gruyter
Imprint: De Gruyter
Publication Date: 29 October 2015
ISBN: 9783110403909
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, LIT004120 LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
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Cristina Delgado-García, University of Birmingham, UK.