Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky
PERFORMING VIOLENCE: LITERARY AND THEATRICAL EXPERIMENTS OF NEW RUSSIAN
DRAMA
Intellect Press, 2009.
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4654/
Also available for orders through the University of Chicago Press:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9781841502694
The so-called "New Russian Drama" emerged at the end of the twentieth
century, following a long period of decline in dramatic writing in the
late Soviet and post-Soviet era. In Performing Violence, Birgit Beumers
and Mark Lipovetsky examine the representation of violence in these new
dramatic works by young Russian playwrights. Reflecting the
disappointment in Yeltsin's democratic reforms and Putin's
neoconservative politics, the plays focus on political and social
representations of violence, its performances, and its justifications.
As the first English-language study of Russian drama and theatre in the
twenty-first century, Performing Violence seeks a vantage point for the
analysis of brutality in post-Soviet culture. While previous generations
had preferred poetry and prose, this new breed of authors-the Presnyakov
brothers, Evgeni Grishkovets, and Vasili Sigarev among them-have
garnered international recognition for their fierce plays. This book
investigates the violent portrayal of the identity crisis of a
generation as represented in their theatrical works, and will be a key
text for students and scholars of drama, Russian studies, and
literature.
Birgit Beumers is a reader in Russian at the University of Bristol,
specializing in contemporary Russian culture. She is the author or
editor of many books, including A History of Russian Cinema and The
Post-Soviet Russian Media.
Mark Lipovetsky is associate professor of Russian studies and
comparative literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has
written several books on Russian literature and culture, including
Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian
Culture of the 1920s-2000s.
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