This study examines the concept of alienation and the various forms of its expression within the dominating theme of justice in four of Alfrid Faraj and Peter Weiss's full length plays. Both dramatists regard alienation as an inevitable state which their idealistic heroes accept as a consequence of their struggle against the injustice predominating their environments. Although the state of alienation is imposed on their protagonists, it serves as a more favourable alternative to that of popular submission to petty human concerns and materialistic greed. One form of expression of this concept is through the binary levels of existence both playwrights create in their plots; the intellectuals versus the uninitiated, the oppressed struggling against their oppressors, reality opposing the power of the imagination, and the mind rebelling against the body. The other is evident in the different dramatic forms employed in the four selected plays. The aim of this study is to examine the extent of Alfrid Faraj's successful attempt at employing contemporary Western dramatic forms to serve his local subject matter. The main concern in the comparative approach is to alter the view that Arab dramatists have yet a lot to learn from the experimentation of their Western counterparts and to indicate the level to which drama in the Arab world can further develop when playwrights such as Faraj continue to experiment with new dramatic forms.

This thesis seeks to construct a comparative framework in which to analyse the literary production of the two twentieth-century German dictatorships. More specifically, it aims to develop an approach to writers and texts in both the Third Reich and the GDR which allows for a measured and balanced assessment of the forms by which they expressed assent and/ or dissent to the National Socialist and SED regimes. In the first half of the thesis three key terms - `totalitarianism', `ideology', and `resistance' - act as broad analytical categories for an explicitly comparative examination of social, political, and cultural-political structures in the two dictatorships. Notwithstanding substantial contrasts in the dynamics and organisational structures of cultural policy, writing under the two regimes is rendered comparable by virtue of the common `total' claim made by the National Socialist and SED regimes on the cultural sphere. The capacity of writers to advance or block that total claim in both the Third Reich and the GDR gives rise to comparable patterns of assent and dissent. Methodologically, this first half of the thesis draws heavily on the recent social historiography of the two German dictatorships where the focus has shifted from monolithic notions of all-encompassing totalitarianism towards the structural limitations and historical continuities which restricted the two regimes in the implementation of their total claims. In particular, the shift away from monumental and heroic acts of `resistance' towards everyday, partial, and often even non-intentional dissenting behaviour acts as a central methodological principle. In the second half of the thesis, the writing of Günter Eich under National Socialism and the cultural activities of Bertolt Brecht in the GDR act as case studies within the theoretical framework developed in the first half of the study. In both cases, their literary production is characterised by a mixture of assenting and dissenting impulses. This study aims to assess the relative weighting of these contradictory tendencies in each case and also to locate common features in the nature of the assent and dissent expressed by these two writers under the conditions of dictatorship. It also seeks to acknowledge an appropriate role for determining factors in the literary production of these two writers which have validity outside the narrow context of dictatorship.

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Receiving Rist’s theatre – a literary-historical challenge A claim in Die AllerEdelste Belustigung Kunsst- und Tugenliebender Gemüther (1666) indicates that Rist may have composed as many as 30 dramas. There are now only five dramatic works attributed to him: Irenaromachia (1630), Perseus (1634), Das Friedewünschende Teutschland (1647), Das Friedejauchtzende Teutschland (1653), Depositio Cornuti Typographici. The best estimate claims that only a further two had been published, a Herodes and a Wallenstein. The others have since been lost, perhaps even destroyed during Rist’s lifetime as his home was sacked twice by invading troops. Of the five that remain, Irenaromachia does not bear Rist’s name, while the Depositio differs greatly in conception and execution from the others and may not have numbered among the 30 claimed theatrical compostions. Thus the surviving dramas do not constitute a more or less unified body of works challenges German literary studies to engage with these discontinuities – a task which it consistently avoids. The problematic nature of the surviving corpus is compounded by the fact that this was only a fraction of what was produced, a situation which invites an (albeit speculative) attempt to contextualise the surviving dramas in a wider sphere of literary-theatrical activity. This leads to the next difficulty, considering that the composition of dramas, even when these number 30 rather than four or five, was just one area of Rist’s prolific activity as a writer. This presents the problem of how to relate Rist’s dramas to his other writings and activities. This task is itself complicated by the tendency to focus on Rist’s verse compositions, which in the twentieth century emphasised his secular compositions. The current focus of much of Rist scholarship lies in his religious songs, from a theological, hymnological,and musicological perspective. He has also maintained a presence in the lay imagination, as several of his songs have been included in Protestant hymnbooks since the 18th century. Scholarship is now, however, turning its attention again to Rist as a dramatist and this thesis is part of this renewed attention. It is difficult to know what to do with Rist’s dramas. The problems they present are considerable, but this thesis will show that Rist’s dramas exist in the context of a concept of dramaturgy and a theory of acting that is much more sophisticated than has often been thought and that goes beyond the narrowly poetic into performance practice.

This thesis investigates the impact of German ideas of ‘romantic drama’ on Shelley’s dramatic conceptions. Taking his reading of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature in March 1818 as its starting point and fundamental basis, it begins by outlining the concept of ‘romantic drama’ that Shelley encountered in Schlegel and traces its subsequent influence on Shelley’s dramas and theoretical prose. In contrast to previous studies of Shelley’s readings of Goethe and Calderón, which focused on common themes such as the nature of evil, I argue that his interest in these writers can first and foremost be understood in the context of his attempts at forming a new drama. Together with Shakespeare, Calderón was the main representative of ‘romantic drama’ for Schlegel, and Goethe’s reaction to the Spaniard paralleled Shelley’s. A chapter on Shelley’s reading of Calderón will demonstrate the scope of his engagment with the Golden Age dramatist, while chapters on his Spanish excerpts and his translations from El mágico prodigioso and Faust will elucidate the English poet’s understanding of Calderón’s and Goethe’s dramatic art and intentions. After analyzing The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Charles the First, the thesis will close with a chapter on Hellas which demonstrates how Shelley draws together the dramatic elements and ideas he had encountered in Schlegel, Calderón, and Goethe. This second lyrical drama represents the epitome of his engagement with these European writers.

This study tests the hypothesis proposed by Frederick Burwick and James McKusick in 2007 that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the author of the anonymous translation of Goethe's Faust published by Thomas Boosey in 1821. The approach to hypothesis testing is stylometric. Specifically, function word usage is selected as the stylometric criterion, and 80 function words are used to define a 73-dimensional function word frequency profile vector for each text in the corpus of Coleridge's literary works and for a selection of works by a range of contemporary English authors. Each profile vector is a point in 80- dimensional vector space, and cluster analytic methods are used to determine the distribution of profile vectors in the space. If the hypothesis being tested is valid, then the profile for the 1821 translation should be closer in the space to works known to be by Coleridge than to works by the other authors. The cluster analytic results show, however, that this is not the case, and the conclusion is that the Burwick and McKusick hypothesis is falsified relative to the stylometric criterion and analytic methodology used.

Despite Brecht's emphasis on its centrality to his theatre, the concept of Gestus has only recently begun to receive more extensive analysis. This thesis contributes to the emergent research field through its exploration of several relatively unexplored areas. Firstly, it offers an account of the obscurity and scholarly neglect of the term 'Gestus' especially with regard to conceptual, linguistic and translation difficulties. Secondly, it presents original archival research into how Brecht applied his concept of Gestus to acting during his work in Berlin between 1949 and 1956. And thirdly, it investigates the role and relevance of Gestus in contemporary Anglo-American theatre. The reconstruction of Gestus is supplemented by a deconstruction of its potential and limitations as a tool for creating political theatre which resists oppressive discourses. With regard to 'potential', this study examines those moments when the Marxist Gestus presents an alternative to dominant tendencies within Western theatre. With regard to 'limitations', two main types of constraint are addressed. The first can be defined as the 'transgression' of the Marxist parameters within which gestic performance was constructed. The second constraint involves the 'suppression' of useful possibilities within and beyond the confines of those parameters. By means of the deconstructive strategy, gestic acting is exposed as a rich site of contradictions. Chapter One focuses mainly on the tensions between a bourgeois individualist and Marxist approach to gesture and an oscillation between the assertion of Gestus as a new Marxist aesthetic principle and as an old rhetorical device. Chapter Two highlights the contradiction between a mechanistic and dialectical materialism and the aesthetic interplay between the flux of montage and the stasis of analytical tableau. In Chapter Three the major tension explored is that between an avant-garde experimental and a deictic realist approach to gestural style. It is in the final two chapters that the role of gestic acting within contemporary theatre is investigated. Chapter Four argues that Gestus is the key to the difference between Brechtian and Stanislavskian modes of acting and demonstrates the exclusion of the Gestus in recent mainstream British theatre where performance often remains dominated by a Stanislavskian-derived system. Here the gestic principle is presented as continuing to challenge ahistorical essentialist approaches to performance. In Chapter Five the appropriation and modification of the Gestus of showing within materialist feminist theatre is discussed and Brecht's application of Gestus in Berlin is revealed as preempting many aspects of recent feminist theory and practice. The study concludes with a summary of the hierarchical binary oppositions - public/private, inscription/agency, demonstration/experience, stasis/flux, populist materialist/avantgarde - which it maintains underpin and contribute to the complex status of gestic acting as both a reactionary and progressive apparatus for societal transformation.

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