Description: As the first full-length study to analyse utopian plays in Western drama from antiquity to the present, this book offers an illuminating appraisal of the objectives of utopianism as manifested in drama through the ages, and ascertains the added value that live performance brings to the persuasion of utopian thought.
Brief description: Siân Adiseshiah is Reader in English and Drama at Loughborough University, UK. Her research interests are in contemporary theatre, utopian studies, and cultural gerontology. She is co-editor of debbie tucker green: Critical Perspectives (2020), Twenty-First Century Drama: What Happens Now (2016), Twenty-First Century Fiction: What Happens Now (2013), and author of Churchill's Socialism: Political Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill (2009).
Review Quotes:
"A beautiful, quietly revolutionary book, never sentimental or overblown, but genuinely moving in its commitment to a transformative politics based on the imaginative formulation of how 'a better world' might look and feel." --The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
"Utopian Drama delivers a breakthrough intervention that cracks open the scholarly paradigms of both theatre studies and utopian studies. Neither field has paid substantial attention to utopian drama; but now Siân Adiseshiah brings the full strength of her politically engaged, theoretically sophisticated and analytically astute interpretive skills to addressing this vacuum. In doing so, she expands the scope of intellectual and social engagement available in both fields and generates a much deeper understanding of the entire problematic utopian form and process. This work is truly a gift to us all." --Tom Moylan, Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland "A welcome addition to utopian studies, rightfully placing Bernard Shaw at the center of a discussion of utopian thought on stage ... a delightful read for Shavians everywhere." --SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies "Siân Adiseshiah's fine and nuanced study of utopian drama is keenly needed at a historical moment when dystopia manifests on all fronts. From Aristophanes to contemporary post-dramatic, non-mimetic performance, this carefully theorized, productively hopeful analysis mines Western theatre traditions for insights into the generative thematic of utopia in drama." --Jill Dolan, author of Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre "Epic in historical scope and engaging with an array of interdisciplinary frameworks, Utopian Drama dislocates utopia from its established home in prose fiction. Diverse, comedic, and sensory, Adiseshiah's dramatic encounters with utopia contest and redress disciplinary exclusion from Utopian Studies. Ephemeral and nomadic, theatre's utopian acts of imagining differently are those that emerge in this illuminating study as critical to dystopian times." --Elaine Aston, Lancaster University, UK "Siân Adiseshiah is not the first to have noticed the preponderance of dystopian dramas in the long history of the theatre. But she is the first to offer an insightful counter-narrative: a history of dramatic utopias that stretches from Aristophanes through Margaret Cavendish to contemporary drama. Clear-eyed and critical, she nonetheless understands that "we need utopias, too." And in a world riven by forces of separation, whether amplified nationalism or a marauding virus, she reminds us of theater's capacity to imagine and inaugurate new social relations." --R. Darren Gobert, Duke University, USA "Utopian Drama offers both a broad and a concise overview of a dramatic genre that has, so far, escaped scholarly attention ... [T]he book's strengths lie ... in its grand, groundbreaking vision. With Utopian Drama, Adiseshiah starts the "search" for a genre that has to be continued-and, thanks to her study, can be continued, too." --Utopian Studies