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Full Description
The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature is the first authoritative and definitive edited collection on absurdist literature. As a field-defining volume, the editor and the contributors are world leaders in this ever-exciting genre that includes some of the most important and influential writers of the twentieth century, including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Albert Camus. Ever puzzling and always refusing to be pinned down, this book does not attempt to define absurdist literature, but attempts to examine its major and minor players. As such, the field is indirectly defined by examining its constituent writers. Not only investigating the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd," this volume wades deeply into absurdist fiction and absurdist poetry, expanding much of our previous sense of what constitutes absurdist literature. Furthermore, long overdue, approximately one-third of the book is devoted to marginalized writers: black, Latin/x, female, LGBTQ+, and non-Western voices.
Contents
Introduction: What Is Absurdist Literature? And Is that What We Are Calling It Now?; PART I Origins; SECTION 1 What Led to Absurdist Literature?; 1 Historical Precursors, I: Ancient Tragicomedy and Pastoral Plays; 2 Historical Precursors, II: Nonsense! From Carroll and Lear through Wilde and Sitwell to the Postmodern; 3 Historical Precursors, III: Gogol and Dostoevsky; 4 Bartleby and Beckett; 5 Kafka as Literature of the Absurd; 6 OBERIU: The Absurd as a Critique of Poetic Reason; 7 The Absurd: Dada and Surrealism; 8 T. S. Eliot and the Group Theatre; SECTION 2 Philosophical Origins: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus; 9 Nietzsche's Absurd Tragedy; 10 Kierkegaard and the Absurd; 11 Sartre and the Absurd; 12 Camus and Absurdity; PART II Absurdist Literature; SECTION 3 Samuel Beckett; 13 Show not Tell: The "Absurdist" Theatre of Samuel Becket; 14 Beckett's Fiction; 15 Credo quia absurdum est: The Subversion of the Rational in Samuel Beckett's Early Poetics; 16 Samuel Beckett's Television Plays; 17 Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays; SECTION 4 1950s: The First Wave; 18 Arthur Adamov; 19 Jean Genet; 20 Eugène Ionesco; 21 Harold Pinter and the Theatre of the Absurd; SECTION 5 1960s: The Emergence of a So-Called "Movement" - Absurdist Literature in English; 22 Edward Albee, Absurdist; 23 Amiri Baraka; 24 Jack Gelber; 25 Arthur Kopit; 26 He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box: Adrienne Kennedy's Absurdist Dreamwrighting; 27 Tom Stoppard and the Absurd; 28 Guerrilla Theatre as Absurd Performance; 29 Understanding the Absurd under the Shadow of Late Capitalism: Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut; 30 Arrabal's Panic Allowances for the Absurd; 31 Friedrich Dürrenmatt; 32 St. Sisyphus: Günter Grass's Absurdist Social Democracy; 33 (Re)Considering Sławomir Mrożek; PART III Absurdist Legacies; SECTION 6 Feminist, LGBTQ+, and Multiethnic Absurdist Literature; 34 Amusing and Shocking: Caryl Churchill's Absurdist Drama; 35 Split Britches and the Camp Absurd; 36 "Beckett Just Seems So Black to Me": Suzan‑Lori Parks as Absurdist Playwright; 37 (Multi)Ethnic Absurdist Theater; SECTION 7 World Absurdist Literature; 38 Luminaries of the Aesthetics of the Absurd in Latin America; 39 Response and Resistance: A Bird's‑eye View of the Absurd in the Spanish‑speaking Caribbean; 40 Middle Eastern Absurdist Literature; 41 Indian Theatres of the Absurd: Cultural Politics of Transformation; 42 Postcolonial Absurdist Literature; 43 Decolonisation and the Theatre of the Absurd; 44 Absurdist Cinema, Television, and Adaptations around the World
