Erin Hurley – författare

How does a tragedy arouse pity and fear? How do music and lighting set a mood or convey an emotional tone for an audience? Why does theatre move us? Theatre & Feeling explores the idea that, for many people, theatre is a passion. It provides an intellectual framework for the range of emotional experience engendered by the theatre, establishing a base-line for further thinking and practice in this rich and emergent area of inquiry. Moving across western dramatic theory and theatre history, the book demonstrates the centrality of feeling to the theatre. Foreword by Anne Bogart.

The plays of the late Nobel laureate Harold Pinter have formed part of the canon of world theatre since the 1960s. Frequently revived on the professional stage, and studied on almost every Theatre Studies course, his importance and influence is hard to overestimate. This Critical Companion offers an assessment of Pinter's entire body of work for the stage, appraising his skill as a dramatist and considering his impact and legacy. Through a clear focus on issues of theatricality and the effect of the plays in performance The Theatre of Harold Pinter considers Pinter's chief narrative concerns and offers a unifying theme through which over four decades of work may be understood. Plays are considered in themed chapters that follow the chronological sequence of work, illuminating the development of his aesthetic and concerns. The volume features too a series of essays from other leading scholars presenting different critical perspectives on the work, including Harry Burton on Pinter's early drama; Ann Hall on Revisiting Pinter's Women; Chris Megson on Pinter's Memory Plays of the 1970s, and Basil Chiasson on Neoliberalism and Democracy.

In National Performance, Erin Hurley examines the complex relationship between performance and national identity. How do theatrical performances represent the nation in which they were created? How is Quebecois performance used to define Quebec as a nation and to cultivate a sense of 'Quebec-ness' for audiences both within and outside the province? In exploring Expo 67, the critical response to Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs, Carbone 14's image-theatre, Marco Micone's writing practices, Celine Dion's popular music, and feminist performance of the 1970s and 80s, Hurley reveals the ways in which certain performances come to be understood as 'national' while others are relegated to sub-national or outsider status. Each chapter focuses on a particular historical moment in Quebec's modern history and a genre of performance emblematic of the moment, and uses these to elaborate the nature of the national performances.Winner of the Northeast Modern Language Association's Book Prize, National Performance is sophisticated yet accessible, seeking to enlarge the parameters of what counts as 'Quebecois' performance, while providing a thorough introduction to changing discourses of nation-ness in Quebec.