An idea for a theatre ecology

This book reconfigures theatre’s relationship with urgent issues to do with ecology and environment by showing how theatre is an ecological event in and by itself. It does so by providing a new theory of theatre ecology that is clearly written and rigorously developed.

Theatre, activism, subjectivity

In modern times of political confusion, when Leftist agendas and struggles often collapse or become appropriated by Right, this book stress the necessity of recovering the Leftist ethos of solidarity, social justice, and care for the commons.

Stages of Life

Four autobiographies of early twentieth-century actors and playwrights are presented in English translation, with substantive chapters on the Parsi theatre and strategies for reading autobiography in the Indian context.

Molière on Stage

‘Molière on Stage’ takes the reader onstage, backstage and into the audience of Molière’s plays, and analyzes the performance of his works in both his own time and ours.

The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor

A historical and critical analysis of the post-traumatic theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, examining the ways they represent Auschwitz in their respective pivotal works ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’.

Popular Theatre in Political Culture

Redefining Theatre Communities

Redefining Theatre Communities explores the interplay between contemporary theatre and communities. It considers the aesthetic, social and cultural aspects of community-conscious theatre-making. It also reflects on transformations in structural, textual and theatrical conventions, and explores ch...

Queer Mythologies

Studies in Fifteenth-Century Stagecraft

A close study of eight plays and the elements Robinson considers essential to performance: playwright, sponsors, location, plot, script, players, and audience.

State of play

This book deals with a wide range of 'high-end', expensive and high concept, TV dramas from the UK and the USA and analyses the compositional principles of texts (technologies, institutions, economics, cultrual trends). Drama examined include Oz, Buried Carnivale, Blackpool, The Sopranos, Shamele...

David Simon's American City

David Simon’s American city examines the work of showrunner David Simon, creator of acclaimed television serials The Wire, Treme and The Deuce. Situating these television serials in their real world context of twenty-first-century America, the book explores how Simon’s work responds to dominant d...

TV antiquity

This is the first comprehensive overview of Greek and Roman historical dramas on television. It traces the development of fictional representations of antiquity from the 1950s to the present, exploring how broader cultural, political and economic issues have influenced the representation of antiq...

Columbo

An analysis of the hit television series Columbo specifically looking at the famous detective’s investigative method of rhetorical enquiry. Through a barrage of questions about tiny details and by feigning ignorance, Columbo employs Socratic method of questioning based on temperance and restraint...

Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama

The book focuses on radio and sound docufiction/docudrama through comparative analysis of case studies from BBC Radio and from Radio RAI and Italian independent producers. It explains how radio language in its acoustic dimension allows access to unpredictable layers of truth complementary or alte...

The Potentials of Spaces

This book interrogates the relationship between scenography and performance in contemporary dramatic activities. The author combines theoretical research with details of dramatic methods and performances, thus providing valuable insight into working practices. The book aims to challenge tradition...

Theatre and Performance in Small Nations

Theatre and Performance in Small Nations features an array of case studies that examine the relationships between theatre, performance, identity and the nation.

Russia, Freaks and Foreigners

Russia, Freaks and Foreigners is a collection of three thematically linked plays set against the backdrop of a fractured, post-Soviet Russian society. Written by acclaimed playwright James MacDonald, who is cerebral palsied, these performance texts critique accepted notions of normality within au...

From Child Art to Visual Language of Youth

This collective provides a critical overview of research on the assessment of visual skills in students from six to eighteen years old. In a series of studies, contributors reconsider evaluation practices used in art education and examine current ideas about children’s development of visual skill...

Television and Criticism

Performing the Iranian State

This book discusses what it means to “perform the State,” what this action means in relation to the country of Iran and how these various performances are represented.

The Trustus Plays

Italian Women's Theatre, 1930-1960

Radical Initiatives in Interventionist & Community Drama

Sacred Theatre

Convergence and Fragmentation

Alisa, Alice

Alisa, Alice' is a humanely cruel and deeply moving drama, full of passion and desire. The clash of two cultures – two worlds – is described with psychological accuracy and depth. Alisa, a young Muslim refugee scarred by the Balkan war finds shelter with Magda, a representative of the common so-c...

Danish Directors

This collection profiles canonized figures alongside recently-established filmmakers, featuring interviews with Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and more. It poses questions that engage with issues within film studies to stimulate debate. Each interview is preceded by the director’s photograph, ...

Traumatic Encounters in Italian Film

This book addresses the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and film, bringing together Lacanian theory and Italian cinema. The author explores the relationship between the Real, the under-represented Lacanian category, and some of the most widely celebrated and lesser-known Itali...

David Cronenberg

Drive in Cinema

In this book, Marc James Léger presents Žižek-influenced studies of films made by the most influential filmmakers of our time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, William Klein, Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, Harmony Korine and more. 

Truth and Storytelling

The book offers a guide for writers to better understand and confront the truths they want to reveal through narrative stories and how to find legitimacy in the fictional characters and situations they create.

World Film Locations: Helsinki

World Film Locations: Helsinki explores the relationship between the city, cinema, and Finnish cultural history. Cinematic representations of Helsinki range from depictions of a northern periphery to a space of cosmopolitanism, from a touristic destination to a substitute for Moscow and St. Peter...

Photocinema

Taking as its starting point the notion of photocinema – or the interplay of the still and moving image – the photographs, interviews, and critical essays in this volume explore the ways in which the two media converge and diverge, expanding the boundaries of each in interesting and unexpected wa...

Fan Phenomena: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn remains one of the world’s most beloved women, ranked as the third greatest screen star of all time by the American Film Institute. This book focuses on the transformative nature of Hepburn's star persona, exploring her journey from ingénue to UNICEF ambassador. It also looks at he...

Green Documentary

This is the first book-length study of environmental documentary filmmaking, offering an analysis of controversial and high-profile documentary films. With analyses that include the wider context of this filmmaking about local rural communities in Britain and Europe, this book also contributes to...

World Film Locations: Dublin

World Film Locations: Dublin offers an engaging look at the many incarnations of the city onscreen through 50 synopses of the key scenes – either shot or set in Dublin – accompanied by a generous selection of full-colour film stills. Sophisticated yet accessible, this volume will undoubtedly take...

Christoph Schlingensief

'Grease Is the Word'

Bringing together a group of international scholars, ‘Grease Is the Word’ offers fresh insight into the impact and legacy of the cultural phenomenon that is Grease.

Jack Clayton

A personal and fascinating account of the career and achievement of an important, much-loved director; Jack Clayton.

French Costume Drama of the 1950s

World Film Locations: Los Angeles

World Film Locations: Los Angeles is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour fil...

World Film Locations: New York

Presenting a varied and thought-provoking collage of the city onscreen – from the silent era to the present – World Film Locations: New York provides a fascinating and historic look back at the rich diversity of locations that have provided the backdrop for some of the most memorable films.

Carol Reed

A major reconsideration of one of British cinema's finest film directors, offering fresh insight into Carol Reed's distinctive work, and his place in the history of British cinema.

Derek Jarman

This book gives detailed and original critical readings of all eleven of Derek Jarman's feature-length films, arguing that he occupies a major and influential place in European and world cinema rather than merely being a cult figure within a particular subculture.

Swedish crime fiction

Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting first with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films and onto English-language BBC productions and Hollywood remakes. This book looks at the r...

Hammer and beyond

The second edition of Peter Hutchings’s landmark work on British horror cinema, featuring later writings by Hutchings and a new introduction by film historian Johnny Walker.

A History of Three-Dimensional Cinema

A History of Three-Dimensional Cinema chronicles 3-D cinema from its origins in 19th-century stereoscopic photography through anaglyphic/digital stereoscopic cinema in the 20th century to the promise of Virtual Reality in the 21st century.

Screen borders

A visual cultural history of contemporary borders and border outlooks through a film and television tour of Europe. Screen borders explores what screen representations of European borders, with France as a starting point, reveals about popular and institutional outlooks on European borders.

The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Situates Martel's features and unstudied short films in relation to trends in recent national and international filmmaking.

Robert Guédiguian

Considers Guédiguian's career, both as a filmmaker and producer, as a valid response to a crisis in post-Communist Leftist political movements in France

Revolutionary Melodrama

Revolutionary Melodrama explores intersections between cinema and politics during the Nasser era, a period in which a military regime embarked upon the construction of a new civic identity for an independent Egypt.

The “Slumdog” Phenomenon

Featuring a dynamic combination of landmark essays by leading critics and theorists, “The ‘Slumdog’ Phenomenon: A Critical Anthology” addresses multiple issues relating to “Slumdog Millionaire,” providing new ways of looking at this controversial film.

Space and being in contemporary French cinema

This book brings together five French directors who have established themselves as among the most exciting working today: Bruno Dumont, Robert Guédiguian, Laurent Cantet, Abdellatif Kechiche, and Claire Denis. It explores their unique strategies of representation and framing that reflect a profou...

Unhomely Cinema

Representations of troubled and inhospitable domestic places are a common feature of many cinematic narratives. “Unhomely Cinema” explores how the unhomely nature of contemporary film narrative provides an insight into what it means to dwell in today’s global societies.

Reaching Audiences

From Hollywood blockbusters to artists’ film and video, distributors play a vitally important role in getting films in front of audiences. As the link between production and exhibition, their acquisition policies, promotional practices and level of resources determine what is available, and so he...

Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative

‘Aesthetics and the Cinematic Narrative’ examines the manner in which disparate Aesthetic traditions inform the conception, creation and reception of cinematic narrative while placing film, as an art form, in a wider historical and aesthetic context.

Theatricality in the Horror Film

As is well known, the horror film generally presents a situation where normality is threatened by a monster. From this premise, ‘Theatricality in the Horror Film’ argues that scary movies often create their terrifying effects stylistically and structurally through a radical break with the realism...

The art of the observer

A personal perspective on documentary filmmaking, based on the author’s own experiences and reflections on the genre, with a particular emphasis on observational cinema. It includes both practical insights into filmmaking methods and discussions of the intellectual, ethical and emotional challeng...

Paolo Sorrentino’s Cinema and Television

New edited collection with a transnational perspective on Paolo Sorrentino, the award-winning Italian director and screenwriter. International contributors take diverse approaches to examine the dominant themes in his work – melancholy, nostalgia and the relationship with solitude - and present o...

World Film Locations: Las Vegas

World Film Locations: Las Vegas goes beyond the clichés of Sin City to examine what Hal Rothman and Mike Davis called 'the grit beneath the glitter', thus providing an opportunity to find out more about the unique position Vegas occupies in the popular imagination.

Teachers and Teaching on Stage and on Screen

Portrayals of teachers in stage plays and films abound. This edited anthology brings together scholars in education to seriously reflect upon portrayals of teachers and teaching in theatre and film.

World Film Locations: Mumbai

Mumbai is a megalopolis of dramatic diversity and heartbreaking extremes, with wealthy areas located just steps away from the searing poverty of its huge slums. The home of Bollywood, Mumbai is also the epicentre of India’s film industry and its foremost film location. Through the lens of Mumbai’...

World Film Locations: Berlin

One of the most dynamic capital cities of the twenty-first century, Berlin also has one of the most tumultuous modern histories. A city that came of age, in many senses, with the cinema, it has been captured on film during periods of exuberance, devastation, division and reconstruction. World Fil...

World Film Locations: Melbourne

World Film Locations: Melbourne serves as a guide to films set wholly or partially in one of Australia’s most diverse and culturally important cities. Offering analyses of iconic scenes, essays on key directors, recurring themes, notable locations, photographs, film stills and city maps, the cont...

Approaches to popular film

An invaluable introduction to popular film and the way in which it is studied, this book brings together the critical approaches and issues that have sought to define popular film from the 1950s to the present day.

Sophia Loren

European stardom is very different from that of Hollywood, where the industry concentrates intensively on establishing and promoting major stars. This unique book sets out to highlight the career of Sophia Loren as a prime example of a highly original rise to fame in a European context. Pauline S...

Bollywood and Globalization

This book is a collection of incisive articles on the interactions between Indian Popular Cinema and the political and cultural ideologies of a new post-Global India.

Screen Writings

'Screen Writings: Genres, Classics, and Aesthetics' offers close readings of genre films and acknowledged film classics in an attempt to explore both the aesthetics of genre and the definition of  'classic' - as well as the changing perception of so-called classic movies over time.

The three amigos

This is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the Mexican born directors Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón. The book examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films.

In Smithereens

Centres on an artistic material encounter with costumes from the archive of iconic British choreographer Lea Anderson. Offers new strategies to understand performances through their material remnants, suggesting alternative ways in which the arguably haunted costumes can live on as ghosts inside ...

Dancing to Transform

Uses original studies of four dance companies to examine the religious lives of American Christians who are also professional dancers. Explores how practices of dancing and Christianity, and experience and performance contexts influence and shape approaches to creating, transforming and performin...

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography is a study of the theory of kinetic theatricality in the western European context. The dancing body of courtly social dance is analyzed in French and Italian dance treatises of the Renaissance through the intertexts of oratorical action, pedagogical di...

The Intellect Handbook of Dance Education Research

A review of dance education research methodologies with examples and exemplars from the field. The research methodologies include qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Exemplars include investigations from pedagogy, history and cultured, community engagement, social justice and internatio...

Dance Studies in China

A collection of articles selected from the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy, translated here for an English-speaking audience. Beijing Dance Academy is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitment to developing excellent professional dancers, choreographers and dance researchers.  ...

Choreographies

Choreographer Jacky Lansley has been practicing and performing for more than four decades. In Choreographies, she offers unique insight into the processes behind independent choreography and paints a vivid portrait of a rigorous practice that combines dance, performance art, visuals and a close a...

Somatic Movement Dance Therapy

Focussing on Somatic Movement Dance Therapy and the importance of self-regulation and co-regulation, chapters deal with self-regulating different tissues through movement, breath, sound and the imagination. Brings together detailed theoretical and experiential anatomy and its application in SMET ...

The Petersburg Noverre, Volume: 1

The Petersburg Noverre is an account of Marius Petipa’s career in Russia that focuses on the description and reception of his ballets.

The Petersburg Noverre, Volume: 2

The Petersburg Noverre is an account of Marius Petipa’s career in Russia that focuses on the description and reception of his ballets.

(Re:) Claiming Ballet

This anthology explores alternative and parallel influences that shape the culture of ballet. The ‘we’ of ballet is complex, encompassing individuals and communities, often marginalized, who contribute to discourses about ballet beyond the mainstream White, patriarchal, Eurocentric, heterosexual ...

Re-Choreographing Cortical & Cartographic Maps

A substantial contribution to current discourses in dance, choreography and performance, especially in the area of Practice-as-Research. Reflects the perspective of the author as scholar, choreographer, performer, and arts practitioner, with an extensive background in both the professional world ...

Serious Play

Clowns’ slapstick is their primary mode of performance and allows them to provoke audiences to laughter wherever they perform. This innovative book, focussing on contemporary practice in the USA and Europe over the last 50 years, investigates the nature and function of clown performance in modern...

Phenomenology for Actors

This book explores how phenomenology – the study of how the world shows itself to conscious experience – can provide new insights into acting and theatre-making. It explores Being-in-the-world in everyday life with practical exercises for rehearsal and performance. 7 b/w illus.

Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance

Kunqu is among the oldest and most refined traditions of the family of genres known as xiqu (music-drama or “Chinese opera”). This book consists of translated performer narrations that illuminate how one of the major Chinese theatrical forms has been taught and transmitted over the past century. 

The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

A comprehensive, historically informed study of the art and politics of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, showing how Almodóvar's films draw on various national cinemas and film genres, including Spanish cinema of the dictatorship, European art cinema, Hollywood melodrama and film noir.