Theatres Of War: French Committed Theatre from the Second World War to the Cold War (Molecular Biology Intelligence Unit) - Softcover

Freeman, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0859895599 ISBN 13: 9780859895590

Publisher: University of Exeter Press, 1998

Synopsis

Theatres of War is the first full-length study to be devoted to the 'Committed' theatre that flourished in modern France from 1944 to the mid-1950s. During this crucial decade, authors such as Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus, along with other lesser-known dramatists, responded to the issues of their time by contributing a number of tense controversial plays to a distinctive genre of realist theatre. These plays dealt with the ideological, political and moral issues arising from the Second World War, the Cold War and a series of disastrous colonial wars. Theatres of War combines historical contextualisation, pointing up the political and moral debate of the theatre of the period, with detailed analysis of specific plays, making it a useful student text. All quotations are in French with English translations immediately following.

About this title

About the Author:

Ted Freeman is Senior Lecturer in French, University of Bristol. He is the author and editor of many books.

Review:

“But some literary works . . . acquire, as the years go by, a 'petite madeleine' quality that brings back, especially to those fortunate to have tasted them when they came out, the whole atmosphere of the period in which they were first produced. This is particularly true of several of the fifteen plays studied in this well-researched and impeccably documented book. . . Freeman brings the atmosphere of the late 1940s and early 1950s so compellingly back to life that I felt at times as though I was reading a particularly good historical novel.” –MLR 94.3, 1999

(MLR)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0859895599
• ISBN 13: 9780859895590
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256