The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill

by Elaine Aston (Editor), Elin Diamond (Editor)

Overview

Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics – ecological crisis, sexual politics, revolution, terror and selfhood – providing close readings of texts in their theatrical, theoretical and historical contexts. These topic-based essays are intercalated with other essays that delve into Churchill's major collaborations, her performance innovations and her influences on a new generation of playwrights. Contributors explore Churchill's career-long experimentation – her risk-taking that has reinvigorated the stage, both formally and politically. Providing a new critical platform for the study of a theatrical career that spans almost fifty years, the Companion pays fresh attention to Churchill's poetic precision, dark wit and inexhaustible creativity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521728942
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	12/10/2009
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Literature
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University.

Elin Diamond is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University.

Table of Contents

Caryl Churchill chronology; 1. Introduction: on Caryl Churchill Elaine Aston and Elin Diamond; 2. On feminist and sexual politics Janelle Reinelt; 3. On owning and owing: Caryl Churchill and the nightmare of capital Jean E. Howard; 4. On the challenge of revolution Mary Luckhurst; 5. On text and dance: new questions and new forms Libby Worth; 6. On Caryl Churchill's ecological drama: right to poison the wasps? Sheila Rabillard; 7. On performance and selfhood in Caryl Churchill R. Darren Gobert; 8. On Churchill and terror Elin Diamond; 9. On collaboration: 'not ordinary, not safe' Elaine Aston; 10. On Churchill's influences Dan Rebellato; Select bibliography: Caryl Churchill.

Editorial Reviews

This is a much-needed and long-awaited addition to the Cambridge Companion series... The volume has been conceptualized and shaped with great care, so it will be of use to a broad range of readers and researchers... The editors have successfully composed a nonlinear, non-chronological volume in order to echo the non-linearity of so much of Churchill’s work.”
—New Theatre Quarterly

From the Publisher