Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance takes a broad, global approach to cultural analysis to examine and critique a wide range of performative acts from the most traditional forms of theatre studies (music, theatre and dance) to more popular, less structured forms of cultural performance. The twenty-first century in particular has seen theatre and performance studies become a major perspective for examining, understanding and critiquing contemporary culture and its historical roots. In addition to traditional theatre studies, then, the series takes as its subject international folk performances, minstrel and music hall shows, vaudeville, burlesque, ballroom dance, rock concerts, professional wrestling, football and soccer matches, snake charming, American snake-handling religions, shamanism, street protests, Nascar or Formula 1 races, tractor pulls, fortune telling, circuses, techno-mobbing, the gestures of painting and writing, and even the performance that denies itself, that pretends that it is not play(ing). Performance is thus a vital manifestation of culture that is enacted, a form to be experienced, recorded, analysed and theorized. It is among the most useful and dynamic foci for the global study of culture.
Read the Series Editor's posts on the Anthem Press Blog
The Fuzzy Edges of Contemporary Theater
The Canon of European Theater / Canone teatrale europeo
Series Editor
S. E. Gontarski – Florida State University, USA
Editorial Board
Alan Ackerman – University of Toronto, Canada
Enoch Brater – University of Michigan, USA
Annamaria Cascetta – Università Cattolica, Italy
Robson Corrêa de Camargo – Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil
Stephen A. Di Benedetto – Michigan State University, USA
Stanton B. Garner, Jr. – University of Tennessee, USA
Lorenzo Mango – Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Italy
Anna McMullan – University of Reading, UK
Marcus Mota – Universidade Federal de Brasilia, Brazil
Martin Puchner – Harvard University, USA
Magda Romanska – Emerson College, USA
Octavian Saiu – National University of Theatre and Film, Romania
Krzystof Salata – Florida State University, USA
Tomasz Wiśniewski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
W. B. Worthen – Columbia University, USA
Proposals
We welcome submissions of proposals for challenging and original works from emerging and established scholars that meet the criteria of our series. We make prompt editorial decisions. Our titles are published in print and e-book editions and are subject to peer review by recognized authorities in the field. Should you wish to send in a proposal for a monograph (mid-length and full-length), edited collection or course book, please contact us at: [email protected].

Edited by Josh Stenberg
created by Yip Siu Hing
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.
Hardback
9781785278075
September 2022
£ 120.00 / $ 195.00

William D. Brewer
Despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in Hannah Cowley’s works, her scandalous comedy The World as It Goes has never been published. This edition of The World as It Goes is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts and contemporaneous reviews.
Hardback
9781839980480
November 2021
£ 80.00 / $ 125.00

Valleri J Robinson
This book highlights the important creative work of Belarusian theatre and filmmakers seeking to raise awareness of the Pro-democracy movement and human rights abuses in Belarus and to build communities of care and mourning following the fraudulent 2020 presidential elections in Belarus.
Paperback
9781839987953
April 2024
£ 20.99 / $ 24.95

Denise Varney and Sandra D'Urso
‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays – ‘The Ham Funeral’ and ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ – by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s.
Hardback
9781783088355
September 2018
£ 45.00 / $ 79.95

S. E. Gontarski
The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader, edited by S. E. Gontarski, is an indispensable guide to the restless, rigorously inventive field of Beckett studies—one that mirrors Samuel Beckett’s own refusal of settled meanings and stable forms.
Paperback
9781801360470
August 2026
£ 25.00 / $ 35.00

Edited by S. E. Gontarski
“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.
Paperback
9781783081547
January 2014
£ 25.00 / $ 40.00

S. E. Gontarski
Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater engages the Williams we thought we knew, as he grew, developed, reconfigured himself into a playwright we didn’t, in his attempts to refashion himself amid the vortices of changing sexual mores, including the performance of masculinities and the queering of theater, the struggle for a literate, literary theater, and the place of the theatrical experience in his contemporary culture.
Paperback
9781785276873
July 2021
£ 20.99 / $ 24.99

Edited by S. E. Gontarski
“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.
Ebook
9781783081585
January 2014
£ 20.00 / $ 32.00

Robert W. Goldsby
‘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.
Paperback
9780857284440
April 2012
£ 24.99 / $ 39.95

Edited and translated by Rakesh H. Solomon
This volume offers the first English translation of one of India’s most celebrated works of anticolonial resistance. It is also the first edition of the play to provide an extensive historical-critical commentary and to draw on a comprehensive range of colonial archival documents.
Paperback
9781783084333
March 2015
£ 25.00 / $ 40.00

Mark Ledbury
A fresh study of creative practice and exchange in theatre and the visual arts in eighteenth-century France, nourished by archival research and by histories of innovation, community and knowledge transfer in the Enlightenment.
Hardback
9781785274213
December 2028
£ 80.00 / $ 120.00

Mark Franko
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 discourses of civility and conceptions of value emanating from descriptions of social interaction in courtesy books.
Hardback
9781785278013
March 2022
£ 80.00 / $ 125.00