<p>The Many Lives of Galileo is a Marxist study of the development of Bertolt Brecht's great play Galileo on the English stage. Tracing various translations of Brecht's original, and the historical and political moments surrounding these translations, Dougal McNeill examines how, across the distances of culture, history and language, The Life of Galileo has come to figure so prominently in the life of English-language theatre. The translations and productions of Galileo by Charles Laughton, Howard Brenton and David Hare are examined, in a method combining close reading with an attention to broader social contexts, with an eye to uncovering their implications for drama in performance. Brecht valued re-creation, re-invention and re-telling as much as creation itself. In this book the author applies Brecht's aesthetic to translations of his own work, following Laughton, Brenton and Hare as they set themselves the task of rewriting Brecht and, in the process, use him to comment on their own eras.</p>

The Many Lives of Galileo: Brecht, Theatre and Translation's Political Unconscious (Stage and Screen Studies)

Literature & Fiction

McNeill, Dougal

Dramas & Plays

Peter Lang Publishing

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike . The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class, culture and politics. While major figures active at the time wrote on or responded to this crucial moment, this is the first volume to address their respective works. Ferrall and McNeill show how novels then in progress, such as Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, were affected by the Strike as well as the ways in which it has been remembered from the 1930s to the present. Their study sheds new light on the relationship between politics and literature of the modernist era.

Writing the 1926 General Strike: Literature, Culture, Politics

Ferrall, Charles

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

Since the publication of his first novel in 1998, China Miéville has distinguished himself as one of the most exciting and inventive writers working in any genre in contemporary British fiction. The author of nine novels and two short story collections to date, as well as comics script-writing, numerous critical works on science fiction, and legal scholarship, Miéville is a critically acclaimed writer who has also achieved popular success.  The chapters in this collection respond to the range of interests that have shaped Miéville's fiction from his influential role in contemporary genre debates, to his ability to pose serious philosophical questions about state control, revolutionary struggle, regimes of apartheid, and the function of international law in a globalised world. This collection demonstrates how Miéville's fictions offer a striking example of contemporary literature's ability to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism at a time of crisis for leftist ideas within the political realm.

China Miéville: Critical Essays (Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays)

Vint, Sherryl

Sanders, Joe Sutliff

March-Russell, Paul

Zähringer, Raphael

Edwards, Caroline

Venezia, Tony

Essays & Correspondence

Gylphi

Whatever happened to realism? What form is adequate to representing our moment, situated as we are after the end of ‘the end of History’? In the face of youth revolts and workers’ insurgencies from Cairo to London, it seems a good time to test the possibilities of alternative Marxist defences of contemporary realist fiction. Can realism’s techniques adequately represent the complexity of contemporary political organisation? This book reads key realist texts from recent decades in order to test their potential to produce the knowledge of history, industrial politics and the metropolis traditionally central to literary realism’s concerns. Positioning himself within and against the inspiration and models of Fredric Jameson’s literary theory, and drawing on innovative realist texts, the author seeks to draw the classic realism controversies of an earlier period in historical materialism into productive conversation with the debates framing the era of austerity.

Forecasts of the Past: Globalisation, History, Realism, Utopia

Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

The Many Lives of Galileo is a Marxist study of the development of Bertolt Brecht’s great play Galileo on the English stage. Tracing various translations of Brecht’s original, and the historical and political moments surrounding these translations, Dougal McNeill examines how, across the distances of culture, history and language, The Life of Galileo has come to figure so prominently in the life of English-language theatre. The translations and productions of Galileo by Charles Laughton, Howard Brenton and David Hare are examined, in a method combining close reading with an attention to broader social contexts, with an eye to uncovering their implications for drama in performance. Brecht valued re-creation, re-invention and re-telling as much as creation itself. In this book the author applies Brecht’s aesthetic to translations of his own work, following Laughton, Brenton and Hare as they set themselves the task of rewriting Brecht and, in the process, use him to comment on their own eras.

The Many Lives of «Galileo»: Brecht, Theatre and Translation’s Political Unconscious (Stage and Screen Studies)

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Books by McNeill, Dougal