In his chapter, Luke Gibbons examines artists and writers who take up the subject of the “great scar” of the Civil War, and in their work he finds silence, misdirection, and the kind of temporal indeterminacies that are characteristic of so much revivalist cultural production. By examining literary and cinematic works by Louis D’Alton, Liam O’Flaherty, John Ford, and Dorothy McCardle, Gibbons argues that temporal discontinuity has a positive role to play by reactivating that which history has deactivated. Civil War literature invites the reader to go beyond the surface realism of the text in a way that provides an opening to the real, which in Lacanian terms is foreclosed and mapped over by imaginary constructs. Gibbons’s consideration of Irish literature and film strongly suggests an alternative to conventional realist accounts beholden to historical causality, a way of reading the temporal discontinuity in way that offers a fresh perspective on the trauma of the Civil War.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

Atonement is a critical component of the cultic system described in Leviticus 1–7 and 16. Purification of sin and thanksgiving offerings shape the worship of Israel. This chapter describes the theology of sacrifice and atonement in Leviticus, the specific offerings, and how atonement has been interpreted by later commentators.

Wherever we are in society, we are surrounded by the Arts. This text has been designed by artists, and the words you read are just visual artworks representing the oral storytelling foundation of all societies. Its layout was designed by artists, using multiple media forms. You are reading it in an environment where the soundscape will hopefully allow you to concentrate. Your body is probably positioned to minimise discomfort and maximise efficiency, while communicating your current state of thought to all those around you (whether consciously or not). Surrounding you may be posters, objects, noises, people interacting with facial expressions, probably some communicating via Facebook, Instagram or other social media using increasingly advanced technologies. The Arts power our lives, yet too often we power down children as they enter formal education (preschool and upwards), stifle their natural forms of communication and interaction, and slowly destroy their ability to be creative and to think diversely.

This chapter explores much of the current research about the value and effect of the Arts in education and assists you to develop your own thinking about the importance of Arts education. This research is framed by an understanding of developing modes of engagement in Arts education, and a discussion of the importance of personal agency and Arts education as ‘praxis’. Finally, the notions of learning ‘in’ and ‘through’ the Arts are explored to enable you to understand the types of learning in which your students can engage.

This chapter will explore the fundamentals of drama, both as a skill and as a methodology for teaching other curricular requirements. It also offers practical activities and assessment practices, as well as theoretical underpinnings and methods to further develop teaching methodologies beyond this text. You will have the confidence and knowledge to engage learners of all ages and abilities to explore their own ideas through dramatic performance and to evaluate the performance of others. The key to drama is not only the development of skills, but also the ability to apply processes and value these processes as equal to the end product of a drama activity. The application of drama in literacy, numeracy and other areas of learning will be embedded throughout. A great deal of the focus on drama in the classroom in Australia is from a western perspective.

This chapter introduces the volume, explaining how O’Casey’s work has been widely read at school and university level, and frequently performed on the stage. The introduction points out that few major studies of O’Casey have been published in recent years, and argues that, by contrast with writers such as Joyce and Yeats, O’Casey is in need of updated critical reframing.

Chapter 11 looks at how skills and competences necessary for successful language learning can be developed in the language classroom through the use of drama, music and games. Developing an understanding of the culture and literature of countries where the foreign language is spoken and what is appropriate at different ages and stages of learning is also examined in this chapter. The use of music and rhyme helps to embed the foreign language in learners’ minds, promoting pedagogical diversity and consolidating learning, particularly with regards to pronunciation, fluency, listening comprehension, memorisation of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as increasing cultural awareness. Drama and games can motivate learners and create a relaxed atmosphere where language skills can develop, thus promoting learner interaction, improving skills and consolidating knowledge.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

Building on work by Karol Berger, this chapter analyses the lengthy final scene of Act 1 from Wagner’s Die Walküre (starting at Sieglinde’s re-entry right before ‘Schläfst du, Gast?‘) through the lens of the formal pattern common in Italian operas of the first half of the nineteenth century and known as la solita forma. The model not only serves to identify the various formal types Wagner uses over the course of this scene but also reveals an intense interaction between form and drama: the formal cues of the different stages of la solita forma, each with its specific dramaturgical implications, are shaped by the shifting dynamics in the game of seduction and recognition between the enamoured siblings Siegmund and Sieglinde.

The essay focuses on the career of playwright Arthur Laurents from his graduation from college to the opening of West Side Story, including discussions of his early plays and screenplays as well as his involvement in the development of the classic musical.

The evolution of Russian drama from the early twentieth century to the present day has been shaped by an alternation between censorship and relaxation, and has included exciting periods of formal innovation. The psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavskii’s stagings of Anton Chekhov’s plays was challenged by the post−1917 radicalism of Vsevolod Meierkhold, exemplified in his production of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe. Experimentation gave way to rigidity under Socialist Realism, but the post-Stalin era saw cautious innovation in playwriting succeeded by a flourishing culture of ‘director’s theatre’, led by figures such as Iurii Liubimov. Innovations gathered pace under glasnost, opening out to the bold variety of ‘New Drama’ in the twenty-first century. This has now given way to the rigid constraints imposed by the Putin regime.

This chapter examines some of the specific methodological challenges of reading dramatic fragments intertextually. It also explores some broader aspects of intertextuality, literary culture, readership, orality, and memory in relation to Greek drama in general. It begins by noting the tendency of commentators and critics to use the formula ‘cf.’ when identifying any sort of similarity between fragmentary texts (or between fragmentary texts and extant ones). But ‘cf.’ on its own is inadequate as an interpretative strategy. This chapter investigates what types of textual relationship are actually being signified by ‘cf.’, and whether it is always possible to know for certain. It also asks to what extent the poor state of the evidence hampers our understanding of textual relations between fragmentary plays, and it raises the problem of how to discern which text is responding to which. These questions are addressed by looking in detail at a number of case studies from works by Aeschylus, Phrynichus, Glaucus, Ion, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

In Edna Longley’s essay “Irish Bards and American Audiences,” she claims that the long-term consequences of the Irish Revival have meant that Americans have set up a “global fan-club” for Irish literature, which risks homogenizing and sanitizing Ireland’s literary output, and leads to a reciprocal state of “Hiberno-American blandness.” Yet, since Longley published her essay two decades ago, there have been continual reevaluations of “Irish” and “Irish-American” literary identities. This chapter considers how far Irish(-American) writers still risk perpetuating what Diane Negra, in The Irish in US (2006), has described as a “theme park” idealization of Irish culture. What does this mean for writers whose work alternatively courts, or avoids, clichés of nostalgia, immigration, and transatlantic travel? What are the cultural consequences of the “blandness” Longley describes? The chapter covers writing by Irish and Irish-American filmmakers, novelists, and dramatists from the past twenty years – including Sally Rooney, Colm Tóibín, Martin McDonagh, and John Patrick Shanley – to consider how such works negotiate the delicate balance between cultural credibility and artistic independence.