Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921) was one of the foremost modernist Polish playwrights. Zapolska’s Women features three of her performance texts that focus on the economic and social pressures faced by women in partitioned Poland at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to the plays, Zapolska’s Women provides a detailed biography of Zapolska, relating her life story to the themes of each play; an analysis of her significance within Polish and European literary and theatrical traditions; and background on the social and historical conditions within Poland during the time the plays were written and originally performed. This informative collection of groundbreaking plays will introduce an English-speaking audience to Zapolska’s important work.

Grigorii Aleksandrov’s musical comedy films, created with composer Isaak Dunaevskii, were the most popular Russian cinema of the 1930s and ’40s. Drawing on studio documents, press materials, and interviews with surviving film crew members, The Musical Comedy Films of Grigorii Aleksandrov presents the untold production history of the films. Salys explores how Aleksandrov’s cinema preserved the paradigms of the American musical, including its comedic tradition, using both to inscribe the foundation myths of the Stalin era in the national consciousness. As the first major study to situate these films in the cultural context of the era, this book will be essential to courses on Russian cinema and Soviet culture.

The notion of spectatorship has become of increasing interest as artists develop experimental works and manufacturers seek to produce the means for viewing such works. Modes of Spectating explores the visual landscapes which spectators encounter, and how they perceive what they view.The volume questions the effect of different mediums on the spectator and asks not only how we view, but also how what we view determines what artists create. Chapters discuss how gaming and televisual media and entertainment are used by young people, and the resulting psychological challenges of human beings in their new ‘spectated’ surroundings of virtual worlds and media. Themes explored include aesthetics, the body and mind and digital entertainment environments, looked at through the lenses of gaming art, photography, sculpture and performance, making it a useful text for scholars of all disciplines of media and art.

In the post-war period, theatre provided an important critique of the way in which British society engaged with issues of the politics of gender and sexuality. Sex on Stage examines how British playwrights brought gender politics including women’s sexuality and gay and lesbian issues to the cutting edge of drama after World War II. Through a close reading of playwrights such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Terence Rattigan, alongside accounts of their socio-political context and public reception, Andrew Wyllie reveals that this more progressive age was also one in which masculine anxieties and a consequent reaction were discernible.With its full treatment of this important aspect of British theatrical history and the intense relationship between theatre, gender politics and society, Sex on Stage will appeal to academics and students of drama, gender studies and cultural studies.

The concept of a public sphere has traditionally been associated with urban spaces. Public Spheres After Socialism contests this in light of shifts of perspective in the East and West after the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union.Public Spheres After Socialism draws together contemporary experiences from Armenia - an interesting site of cultural and political cross-currents - Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom. It reconsiders the concept of a public sphere as a figurative, or mythical, location in which the members of a society shape and determine its values and ask to what extent this public sphere exists or is viable today. Among the ideas presented in this groundbreaking volume are the cultures of public time, everyday memorials, urban reconstruction, film as a dialogic site, and the mapping of a post-socialist city in youth culture.Esteemed academics cover a wide range of issues, including public spaces and monuments, urban reconstruction, film, new media and communication. They explore the major shifts in theory and consider how the dualism of the Cold War has been replaced by the single ideological position of globalized consumerism.

Is obsession with the Royal Family in Britain a fact of culture or an illusion of media culture? What interest do the European media display in their royal families? Does twenty-first century monarchy remain a political and ideological force - or is it just an economic commodity? Media, Monarchy and Power provides a radical insight into the cultural and political functioning of royalty in five countries. Blain and O'Donnell examine the bonds between monarchies and their 'subjects' or 'citizens', and the relationships between royal families, the media, and nation-states. Numerous case-studies from press and television in Europe and the UK support a theoretical account of the operation of monarchy and royalty in the media. Central to the concerns of Media, Monarchy and Power are the complex relationship between Britain and Europe and the limits of British political modernization.