Theatre Histories

Tobin Nellhaus is an independent scholar and former Librarian for Performing Arts, Media and Philosophy at Yale University. He writes mainly on the relationship between theatre and communication practices, and on critical realism in theatre historiography. Bruce McConachie is Chair of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs and performs. He has published widely in American theatre history, theatre historiography, and performance and cognitive studies, and is a former President of the American Society for Theatre Research.  Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre and Performance Studies and former Vice Chair for Graduate Programs at UCLA and former Research Fellow in the Institute for Theatre Studies at Berlin's Free University. She is a scholar, translator, playwright, and director focusing on Japanese and cross-cultural theatre. Tamara Underiner is Associate Dean for Research for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, and director of the Ph.D. program in Theatre and Performance of the Americas.

General Introduction. Part I: Performance in Oral and Manuscript Cultures. Introduction: Speech, Writing, and Performance 1. From Oral to Literate Performance 2. Pleasure, Power, and Aesthetics: Theatre in Early Literate Societies, 500 BCE–1450 CE 3. Commemorative Drama and Carnival. Part II: Theatre and Performance in Early Print Cultures. Introduction: Performance, Printing, and Political Centralization 4. Secular and Early Professional Theatre, 1250–1650 5. Theatre and the Print Revolution, 1550–1650 6. Theatres of Absolutism, 1600–1770. Part III: Theatre and Performance in Periodical Print Cultures. Introduction: Theatre for Bourgeois Civil Society 7. Theatre and Sentiment: Newspapers, Private Lives, and the Bourgeois Public Sphere, 1700–1785 8. Nationalism in the Theatre, 1760–1880 9. Performing "Progress": From Imperial Display to the Triumph of Realism and Naturalism, 1790–1914 10. New Media Divide the Theatres of Print Culture, 1870–1930. Part IV: Theatre and Performance in Electric and Electronic Communication Culture. Introduction: Theatre and the Unceasing Communications Revolutions 11. New Theatres for Revolutionary Times, 1910–1950 12. The Aftermath of World War II: Realism and its Discontents in an Increasingly Shrinking World, 1940–1970 13. Art, Politics or Business?: Theatre in Search of Identity, 1968–2000 14. Theatres of Local Roots and Global Reach (1970–Present) 15. Theatre in Networked Culture, 1990–Present. Glossary