Pirandello

Unit 1:

General Topic: Rejection of Realism in Drama

Text: Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)


A scene from Six characters directed by Bergman

Unit 2: 

General Topic: The Epic Theatre

Text: Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948)

Unit 3:

General Topic: The Theatre of the Absurd

Text: Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1961-2)

Unit 4:

Lights Out Cover

General Topic: Modern Indian Drama

Text: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out (1986)

 scene from Lights Out


Lights out scene

Reference Books:

Raymond Williams. Drama: From Ibsen to Brecht.  London: University Press, 1987. 

Bassanese, F. A. , Understanding Luigi Pirandello. Univ of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Pirandello Luigi, Bentley Eric. Six Characters in Search of an Author. Signet Classics,1998.

Harold Bloom. Luigi Pirandello (Bloom’s major dramatists). Philadelphia. Chelsea House Publishers. 2003.

Antonin Artaud. The Theater and its Double. London: Colder and Boyers, 1970.

Travis Bogard and W.T. Oliver.ed. Modern Drama. London: OUP, 1965.

Styan, J. L.  The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. Cambridge: CUP, 1962

Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt. New York: NYU, 1991.

Styan J. L Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: CUP, 1982.

Styan J. L. Elements of Drama. Cambridge: CUP, 1960.

M. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011

Esslin, Martin.  The Theatre of the Absurd. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015

Matthew Roudané,  Edward Albee: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge introductions to literature.  Cambridge University Press, 2017

Govind P. Deshpande Modern Indian drama: an anthology Sahitya Akademi, 2000

Sudhakar Pandey, Freya Barua. New Directions in Indian Drama: With Special Reference to the Plays Ot Vijay Tendulkar, Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad Prestige, 1994

M. K. Naik, Shankar Mokashi-Punekar, Perspectives on Indian drama in English Oxford University Press, 1977

Bradbury and McFarlane eds. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890- 1930 (Penguin)

Peter Childs. Modernism (Routledge: The New Critical Idiom Series)

Patricia Waugh ed. Postmodernism: A Reader (Edward Arnold)

Barret H. Clark. A Study of Modern Drama. New York: NYUP, 1925.

Mane, Prabhanjan. Interpreting Drama. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2010.

Gassner John, Masters of the Drama, New York, Dover Publication 1954.

Lumley Frederich, New Trends in 20th Century Drama Barrie and, London , Jenkins, 1972.