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
