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This cutting-edge title explores how narrating the past both conflicts and creates an interesting relationship with drama´s ´continuing present´ that arcs towards an unpredictable future. Theatre both brings the past alive and also fixes it, but through the performance process, allowing the past to be molded for future (not-yet-existent) audiences.

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Introduction: Translating History´s Narratives on the Modern Stage Danton´s Memory: Structural Impossibilities in Büchner´s Danton´s Death Salome´s Tale-Jokanaan´s Telling-Wilde´s Retelling: Historical Relativity and (Un)specificity in Wilde´s Salome Galileo´s Narrative: Translating ´Conditions´ in Brecht´s Life of Galileo Conclusion

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´Narrating the Past through Theatre is a philosophical/literary discussion of how works of literature translate the past for the present and the future. It is a worthwhile discussion since the past as we know it at the beginning of the twenty-first century is unbearably burdensome unless we can somehow own it intellectually. Michael Y. Bennett´s discussion of these texts is not polemical, but analytical, demonstrating the philosophical depths which drama must reach. These are all crucial moments in the intersection of time and culture. I find his reading simply the best thing I have ever read on Salome; the pace of fascinating insights is quite thrilling. I don´t know of anyone who writes about drama quite like Bennett does. Perhaps Bert O. States would be a possible comparison. Both States and Bennett refuse to let philosophy or drama dominate the other. This book is solid intellectually, thoroughly researched, clearly and engagingly written, and will be a great success.´ - Robert Combs, George Washington University, USA

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Michael Y. Bennett is Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA, where he teaches courses on modern drama. He is the author of: Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd (2011/2013); Words, Space, and the Audience (2012); Narrating the Past through Theatre (2012). He is the editor of Refiguring Oscar Wilde s Salome (2011) and the co-editor of Eugene O´Neill´s One-Act Plays (2012). He is also Editor of The Edward Albee Review.

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