Volume 33 of Theatre History Studies explores war. War is a paradox—horrifying and compelling, galvanizing and devastating, a phenomenon that separates and decimates while at the same time creating and strengthening national identity and community bonds. War is the stuff of great drama.War and theatre is a subject of increasing popularity among scholars of theatre. The essays in this special edition of Theatre History Studies brings together a unique collection of...

Beginning in late Edo, the Japanese faced a rapidly and irreversibly changing world in which industrialization, westernization, and internationalization was exerting pressure upon an entrenched traditional culture. The Japanese themselves felt threatened by Western powers, with their sense of superiority and military might. Yet, the Japanese were more prepared to meet this challenge than was thought at the time, and they used a variety of strategies to address the tension between modernity...

In this dynamic and utterly novel presentation, David Loy explores the fascinating proposition that the stories we tell—about what is and is not possible, about ourselves, about right and wrong, life and death, about the world and everything in it—become the very building blocks of our experience and of reality itself. Loy uses an intriguing mixture of quotations from familiar and less-familiar sources and brief stand-alone micro-essays, engaging the reader in challenging and illuminating ...

"Few memoirs have the concision, modesty, and charm that mark this late-life work by . . . America's most renowned scholar and interpreter of Japan."— Foreword ReviewsIn this eloquent and wholly absorbing memoir, the renowned scholar Donald Keene shares more than half a century of his extraordinary adventures as a student of Japan. Keene begins with an account of his bittersweet childhood in New York; then he describes his initial encounters with Asia and ...

Committing Theatre offers the first full-length historical study of political intervention theatre and theatrical spectatorship in English Canada. Building on twenty years of research and engagement in the field, this book’s historical narrative frames close-up examples of how theatre artists have intervened in and engaged with political struggle from the mid-19th century to the present. Lumber-camp mock trials, Mayday parades and street protests, the Workers Theatre Movement, agi...

A critical biography of a modern Japanese literary giant, whose brilliant career ended in a spectacular ritual suicide.Yukio Mishima (b. 1925) was a brilliant writer and intellectual whose relentless obsession with beauty, purity, and patriotism ended in his astonishing self-disembowelment and decapitation in downtown Tokyo in 1970. Nominated for the Nobel Prize, Mishima was the best-known novelist of his time (works like Confessions of a Mask and The ...

'At last, the past has arrived! Performing Remains is Rebecca Schneider's authoritative statement on a major topic of interest to the field of theatre and performance studies. It extends and consolidates her pioneering contributions to the field through its interdisciplinary method, vivid writing, and stimulating polemic. Performing Remains has been eagerly awaited, and will be appreciated now and in the future for its rigorous investigations into the aesthetic and politi...

In performances by Euro-Americans, Afro-Americans, Native Americans, and Asians, Richard Schechner has examined carefully the details of performative behavior and has developed models of the performance process useful not only to persons in the arts but to anthropologists, play theorists, and others fascinated (but perhaps terrified) by the multichannel realities of the postmodern world.Schechner argues that in failing to see the structure of the whole theatrical process, anthropol...

As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or f...

A great deal of Buddhist literature and scholarly writing about Buddhism of the past 150 years reflects and indeed constructs a historically unique modern Buddhism even while purporting to represent ancient tradition timeless teaching or the "essentials" of Buddhism. This literature Asian as well as Western weaves together the strands of different traditions to create a novel hybrid that brings Buddhism into alignment with many of the ideologies and sensibilities of the post-Enlightenment ...

The Canadian Modernists Meet is a collection of new critical essays on major and rediscovered Canadian writers of the early to mid-twentieth century. F.R. Scott's well-known poem 'The Canadian Authors Meet' sets the theme for the volume: a revisiting of English Canada's formative movements in modernist poetry, fiction, and drama. As did Scott's poem, Dean Irvine's collection raises questions - about modernism and antimodernism, nationalism and antinationalism, gender and class, or...

Increased use of mass transportation in the early twentieth century enabled men and women of different social classes to interact in ways they had not before. Using a cultural studies approach that combines historical research and literary analysis, author Alisa Freedman investigates fictional, journalistic, and popular culture depictions of how mass transportation changed prewar Tokyo's social fabric and artistic movements, giving rise to gender roles that have come to characterize modern...