A young stagehand must complete a host of tasks before the moon can take center stage in the theater of night.

In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard's novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they...(展开全部)

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement of the ideas of Antonin Artaud. We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” he wrote. He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the v...(展开全部)

A dazzling study of the operas Verdi adapted from Shakespeare- and a spellbinding account of their creation. In "Verdi's Shakespeare, " Pulitzer Prize winner and lifelong opera devotee Garry Wills explores the writing and staging of Verdi's three triumphant Shakespearian operas: "Macbeth, Othello, " and "Falstaff." An Italian composer who couldn't read a word of English but ad...(展开全部)

In eleventh-century China, both the living and the dead were treated to theatrical spectacles. Chambers designed for the deceased were ornamented with actors and theaters sculpted in stone, molded in clay, rendered in paint. Notably, the tombs were not commissioned for the scholars and officials who dominate the historical record of China but affluent farmers, merchants, cleric...(展开全部)

The past decade has seen an extraordinarily intense period of experimentation with computer technology within the performing arts. Digital media has been increasingly incorporated into live theater and dance, and new forms of interactive performance have emerged in participatory installations, on CD-ROM, and on the Web. In Digital Performance, Steve Dixon traces the evolution o...(展开全部)

As the Imperial Japanese Army swept across China and South Asia at World War II's outset, closing all of China's seaports, more than 200,000 Chinese laborers embarked on a seemingly impossible task: to cut a 700-mile overland route -- the Burma Road -- from the southwest Chinese city of Kunming to Lashio, Burma. But when Burma fell in 1942, the Burma Road was severed. As the fi...(展开全部)

Uniquely covering literary, visual and performative expressions of culture, this volume aims to correlate the conjunctions of nation building, gender and representation in late 19th and early 20th century China and Japan. Focusing on gender formation, the chapters explore the changing constructs of masculinities and femininities in China and Japan from the early modern up to th...(展开全部)