Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter

Fifty years after the publication of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, which suggests that "absurd" plays purport the meaninglessness of life, Michael Y. Bennett's Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd is a timely reassessment of one of the most important theatre "movements" of the 20th century. Bennett argues that these "absurd" plays are, instead, ethical texts that suggest how life can be made meaningful. Analyzing the works of five major playwrights/writers of the 1950s (including three winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature), Bennett's work challenges fifty years of scholarship though his upbeat and hopeful readings.

Author: M. Bennett
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 03/31/2011
Pages: 179
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9780230113381
ISBN10: 0230113389
BISAC Categories:
- Performing Arts | Theater | History & Criticism
- Performing Arts | Theater | Playwriting
- Literary Criticism | Drama

About the Author
Michael Y. Bennett is Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA, where he teaches courses on modern drama. He is the author of Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011/2013), Words, Space, and the Audience (2012), and Narrating the Past through Theatre (2012). He is the editor of Refiguring Oscar Wilde's Salome (2011); and the co-editor of Eugene O'Neill's One-Act Plays: New Critical Perspectives (2012) as well as editor of The Edward Albee Review .