Lionel Abel coined the word ‘metatheatre’ in his 1963 book, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form, claiming he had discovered a new type of theatre, and cited Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the first metatheatrical play. Over the intervening decades, various scholars have pushed the incidence of the earliest metatheatrical play back beyond Hamlet. Richard Hornby, in his 1986 book, Drama, Metadrama,...

the concept of diegesis (telling or recounting a story) originally appeared in plato's thesis as opposed to mimesis (showing or enacting a story). plato described diegesis as the third person style of expressing a fiction mediated by an author/narrator, whereas he proposed mimesis as the first person style of presenting a story by means of characters and actions. aristotle then applied mim...

Almost immediately after it was mooted as a descriptor for our current geological age, the Anthropocene came under sustained criticism. It said label projected unearned heroism onto humanity master of natural world, while downplaying culpability Global North unlocking ruinous potential industrialism and technology (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Haraway, 2015; Malm, Moore, 2015). Numerous alternativ...

First paragraph: The history of literature and art offers no shortage of works created to offend or shock an audience, but few have been as incendiary as gangsta rap. Apologists cannot deny the problematic content of this form of rap—the misogynistic posturing, themes of intense violence, freewheeling and gratuitous obscenity—and some detractors hold that even the attempt to analyze the genre b...