First collection of essays, by some of the leading scholars in their field on one of the most controversial and influential dramatists who emerged during the ‘In-Yer Face’ generation of British dramatists in the 1990s. Essential, wide-ranging, European guide to Kane for students and scholars of Theatre Studies or English Literature.

ContentsIntroduction(Laurens De Vos and Graham Saunders)Part I: Surrounding Voices1. Reviewing the fabric of Blasted(Elaine Aston)2. Sarah Kane before Blasted: the monologues(Dan Rebellato)3. ‘Looks like there’s a war on’: Sarah Kane’s Blasted, political theatre and the Muslim Other(Aleks Sierz)4. Staging Power: the politics of sex and death in Seneca’s Phaedra and Kane’s Phaedra’s Love(Zina Giannopoulou)5. The Beckettian world of Sarah Kane(Graham Saunders)6. Cruelty, violence and rituals in Sarah Kane’s plays(Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeier)7. Sarah Kane, experiential theatre and the revenant avant-garde(Clare Wallace)Part II: Subjectivity, Responsibility and Representation8. The voice of Kane(Ehren Fordyce)9. ‘I love you now’: time and desire in the plays of Sarah Kane(Robert I. Lublin)10. Sarah Kane and Antonin Artaud: cruelty towards the subjectile(Laurens De Vos)11. Posthumanist identities in Sarah Kane(Julie Waddington)12. Neither here nor there: theatrical space in Kane’s work(Annette Pankratz)13.‘Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander’: critical distance in Sarah Kane’s Theatre of Cruelty(Hillary Chute)14. Sarah Kane’s Phaedra's Love: staging the implacable(Peter A. Campbell)15. Under the surface of things. Sarah Kane’s Skin and the medium of theatre(Mateusz Borowski) 16. ‘We are anathema’ – Sarah Kane’s plays as postdramatic theatre v. the ‘Dreary and repugnant tale of sense’(Eckart Voigts-Virchow)Epilogue‘The mark of Kane’(Edward Bond)References List of Contributors Index

From the controversy in 1995 that heralded Blasted, to her death in February 1999, Sarah Kane built a reputation as an established playwright of international stature. This is the first volume of collected essays by some of the leading scholars in their field, providing a comprehensive approach to the body of work she produced in this brief period. Essays included cover the political, literary and theatrical identities that have exerted influence on Kane’s work, as well as discussing and assessing her innovative theatrical experiments and the performative issues that arise from within the plays. Sarah Kane in context examines one of the most controversial and influential dramatists who emerged during the ‘In-Yer Face’ generation of British dramatists in the 1990s and provides an essential guide to Kane for students and scholars alike.