FYS: Why Is It Funny? (Bungard): Getting Started

"Aside from the well-known plays of Aristophanes, many of the comedies of ancient Greece are known only through fragments and references written in Greek. Now a group of distinguished scholars brings these nearly lost works to modern readers with lively English translations of the surviving texts. The Birth of Comedy brings together a wealth of information on the first three generations of Western comedy."

"This work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of 19th-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840 to 1880."

"Fully revised and updated, the third edition of this deservedly popular history book incorporates new currents in historical writing on matters such as the language of class, the position of women, and the revolution worked by the Internet and mobile technologies."

"Stagestruck traces the making of a vibrant French theater industry between the reign of Louis XIV and the French Revolution. During this era more than eighty provincial and colonial cities celebrated the inauguration of their first public playhouses. These theaters emerged as the most prominent urban cultural institutions in prerevolutionary France, becoming key sites for the articulation and contestation of social, political, and racial relationships."

"The book proposes the following hypothesis: that non-technical literature in the Roman world, both poetry and prose, was composed in the first instance for oral delivery to a large public audience, and that the copying and circulation of written texts was only a secondary stage in the ‘publication’ process."