Product Description: This edition contains the three most important works of Charles Reade (1814-1884). Reade adapted the social purpose and concern for detail of the realistic novel to the stage. He was much concerned with poverty, the brutality of the prison regime of his time and the abuse of mental asylums...read more

A collection of critical essays on Wilde's comedic play 'The Importance of Being Earnest' arranged in chronological order of publication.

Certain works of Romantic drama--- Prometheus Unbound, Cain, The Cenci-- have received a good deal of critical attention, by as a whole the genre has been misunderstood and only slightly considered. Alan Richardson redresses a tradition of critical neglect by considering the works of Romantic drama not as failed stage-plays ("closet drama") but as constituting a new, distinctively Romantic genre. In turning from the contemporary stage--which was marked by spectacle, rant, and melodrama--the Romantic poets developed an altogether new kind of drama, one which they hoped could recapture the intensity of Shakespearean tragedy that Neoclassical writers had scarcely approached.Richardson class this genre (after Byron) "mental theater," both because its works are concerned with portraying the development of self-consciousness and because it fuses the subjectivity of lyric with the interaction of dramatic poetry. Moreover, these works are addressed directly to the mind of the reader, bypassing the medium of stage representation. This study places Romantic self-consciousness in a fundamentally new light. Far from uncritically pursuing an egoistic stance, the Romantics criticize through their poetic drama the attempt to attain psychic autonomy. The protagonists of Romantic drama are seduced by their antagonists into entering such a condition only to find in it a hollow, deathly isolation. They find in self-consciousness not their promised liberation, but a tormented fate modeled after that of their betrayers. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley delineate the limitations of "Romantic" self-consciousness in their works of mental theater; Shelley alone envisions their transcendence through his radical transformation of consciousness in the conclusion to Prometheus Unbound.This interpretation of mental theater will lead to a new evaluation of the Romantics as dramatic poets. It brings back to critical attention neglected but challenging works such as Byron's Heaven and Earth and Bedd

Presents an in-depth study of the complex and tragic life of Oscar Wilde and a tribute to his inimitable wit and brilliant writings

Product Description: Book by Ashley, Leonard R. N.

(view table of contents)

G.K. Chesterton This volume includes the collected plays of G. K. Chesterton, his controversial writings on Bernard Shaw (who referred to GKC as a colossal genius), and a bibliography. Many of the items appear for the first time in book form. Among his plays included here are: "The Wild Knight", "Magic", "The Judgment of Dr. Johnson", "The Turkey and the Turk", and "The Surprise". Among his writings on Shaw included here are: "Do We Agree?" (a debate), "How I Found the Superman", "Sorry, I'm Shaw", and "A Salute to the Last Socialist". Chesterton himself gives the best summary of what we found in this volume when he says of Shaw: "I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world; and we have always been on opposite sides without affectation or animosity. I have defended the institution of the family against his Platonic fancies about the state ... institutions of beef and beer against his hygienic severity of vegetarianism and total abstinence.... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend." Table of Contents: Acknowledgements General Editors' Introduction Introduction by Denis J. Conlon Collected Plays Dialogue between Our Lord and St. Joseph The Wild Knight Time's Abstract and Brief Chronicle Magic The Flying Inn The Temptation of St. Anthony The Turkey and the Turk What You Won't The Judgement of Dr. Johnson The Surprise The Ages Are Passing Chesterton on Shaw The Great Shawkspear Mystery Sorry, I'm Shaw On the Alleged Pessimism of Shakespeare How I Found Superman George Bernard Shaw G.B.S. versus G.K.C. A Salute to the Last Socialist The Case against Chesterton Replies Do We Agree? - A Debate Shakespeare and Shaw Bernard Shaw and Breakages Bernard Shaw and Ame

Product Description: A critical edition that sets out the final version of Vera, Wilde's first performed play, as it was presented at its premiere on August 20, 1883, at the Union Square Theater in New York City.

Product Description: Book by Pine, Richard

Explores Victorian life by examining theater, novels, and biographies of that period

Product Description: Many nineteenth-century writers believed that the best tragedy should be read rather than performed, and they have often been attacked for their views by later critics. Through detailed analysis of Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, Lamb's On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, and Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, Heller shows that in their concern with educating the reader these Romantics anticipate twentieth-century reader response criticism, educational theory, and film criticism...read more

Product Description: Part of a series which assembles vital facts about playwrights and their work, this book on Oscar Wilde offers a checklist of all his plays, a detailed performance history, excerpted reviews and a selection of Wilde's own comments on his work drawn from essays, interviews, letters and diaries...read more

Product Description: In this book Anthony Jenkins examines seven Victorian playwrights who, despite their own ideals and prejudices and the theatre's conservatism, tried to come to terms with such momentous subjects as womanliness, honour and money. The opening chapter briefly describes the social transformation of theatre during the century and the increasing respectability of actors and playhouses...read more

Product Description: With Wilde's Salome (1893) as an exemplary text, this book examines the conditions under which speech «constructs» ecstatic experience. The author considers Wilde's text as a complex Symbolist «system» of relations between rhetorical devices and attitudes toward language...read more

Product Description: Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones established an English drama that was respected by other countries. They dedicated themselves to the reclamation of English drama from the doldrums of the late 18th century. Together they raised standards in the theatre of acting and production, explored important social and moral issues, and fought a lifelong battle with the censor, changing standard views of what was acceptable in the theatre...read more

Product Description: The professional success achieved by W. S. Gilbert was unique in nineteenth-century English theater: he was the first dramatist ever to be knighted for his stage works, which yielded him a fortune that his less prosperous playwriting predecessors could scarcely have imagined...read more