Anthem Studies in Theatre and Performance

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  

Theatre and/as Adaptation
 

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].

Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance

Kunqu Masters on Chinese Theatrical Performance

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

The World as It Goes

The World as It Goes

A Comedy

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

Belarusian Theatre and the 2020 Pro-Democracy Protests

Belarusian Theatre and the 2020 Pro-Democracy Protests

Documenting the Resistance

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

Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White

Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White

Governing Culture

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

The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader

The Anthem Beckett Studies Reader

Re-viewing Samuel Beckett

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

On Beckett

On Beckett

Essays and Criticism

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

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater

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

On Beckett

On Beckett

Essays and Criticism

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

Molière on Stage

Molière on Stage

What’s So Funny?

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

Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’

Globalization, Nationalism and the Text of ‘Kichaka-Vadha’

The First English Translation of the Marathi Anticolonial Classic, with a Historical Analysis of Theatre in British India

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

Art and Theatre as a Community of Practice in Eighteenth-Century France

Art and Theatre as a Community of Practice in Eighteenth-Century France

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

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography

The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography

Kinetic Theatricality and Social Interaction

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

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