Dramatic Apparitions and Theatrical Ghosts

The Staging of Illusion across Time and Cultures

Buch | Hardcover

248 Seiten

2023
Methuen Drama (Verlag)
978-1-350-37169-9 (ISBN)

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Ghosts haunt the stages of world theatre, appearing in classical Greek drama through to the plays of 21st-century dramatists. Tracing the phenomenon across time and in different cultures, the chapters collected here examine their representation, dramatic function, and what they may tell us about the belief systems of their original audiences and the conditions of theatrical production. As illusions of illusions, they foreground many dramatic themes common to a wide variety of periods and cultures.

Arranged chronologically, this collection examines how ghosts represent political change in Athenian culture in three plays by Aeschylus; their function in traditional Japanese drama; the staging of the supernatural in the dramatic liturgy of the early Middle Ages; ghosts within the dramatic works of Middleton, George Peele, and Christopher Marlowe, and the technologies employed in the 18th and 19th centuries to represent the supernatural on stage.

Coverage of the dramatic representation of ghosts in the 20th and 21st centuries includes studies of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, plays by Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Sarah Ruhl, Paddy Chayefsky’s The Tenth Man, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog, and the spectral imprint of Shakespeare’s ghosts in the Irish drama of Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. The volume closes by examining three contemporary American indigenous plays by Anishinaabe author, Alanis King.

Ann C. Hall is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville, USA. She is the author of Phantom Variations: The Adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, 1925 to the Present (2009) and A Kind of Alaska: Women in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard (1993). She is currently the President of the International Harold Pinter Society and editor of The Harold Pinter Review. Alan Nadel is William T. Bryan Chair in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky, USA. He is the author of six books on post-WWII American literature, including: The Theatre of August Wilson (Methuen Drama, 2018), Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s (2017), Containment Culture (1995), and Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (1994). He has also edited of two volumes of essays on August Wilson, August Wilson: Completing the 20th-Century Cycle (2010) and May All Your Fences Have Gates (1994).

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Preface

Summoning the Illusion Within the Illusion—An Introduction, Ann C. Hall (University of Louisville, USA) and Alan Nadel (University of Kentucky, USA)

1. Made of Anxiety: Two (or Three) Ghosts in Aeschylus, John Timpane (Independent scholar, USA)
2. A Theater of Ghosts: Spirits on the Traditional Japanese Stage, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, USA)
3. The Holiest of Ghosts: Staging the Supernatural in the Early Middle Ages, Andrew Rabin (University of Louisville, USA)
4. “I Am Not Here”: Staging the (Un)Dead and the Thresholds of Theatrical Performance, Christopher Salamone (University of Oxford, UK)
5. Creating Stage Ghosts: The Archeology of Spectral Illusion, Beth Kattelman (Lawrence and Lee Theater Research Institute, The Ohio State University, USA)
6. Blithe Spirit: A Spectral Anatomy of Astral Bigamy, Judith Roof (Independent scholar, USA)
7. The Ghost of Unrequited Love Possesses the Modern Heart: Paddy Chayefsky’s Dybbuk in The Tenth Man, Ben Furnish (Haskell Indian Nations University, USA)
8. Of Outlaws and Spirits: Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love (1983) and David Mamet’s Prairie du Chien (1979) and The Shawl (1985), Ann C. Hall (University of Louisville, USA)
9. Literal Ghosts, Figurative Humanity, and the Specter of Capitalism in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle, Alan Nadel (University of Kentucky, USA)
10. “All Spooked Out”: Topdog/Underdog’s Ghosts, Jennifer Larson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
11. Deficient Visitations: Staging Ghostliness and Irishness in Martin McDonagh’s Comedy, Craig N. Owens (Drake University, USA)
12. Holding the Dead Close: The Comfort of Ghosts in the Plays of Sarah Ruhl, Amy Muse (University of St. Thomas, USA)
13. Anishinaabe, Dakhota, and Nimiipuu Hauntings in the Indigenous Drama of Alanis King, LeAnne Howe, and Beth Piatote, Margaret Noodin (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, USA)

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	22.08.2023
Zusatzinfo	9 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-350-37169-6 / 1350371696
ISBN-13	978-1-350-37169-9 / 9781350371699
Zustand	Neuware