Elaine Aston
Biographic Data
| ID | 307101 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Elaine Aston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Elaine |
| FAMILY NAME | Aston |
| SIGNATURE | ASTON E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lancaster University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2875-6438 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 10 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Caryl Churchill's Eco-Socialist Feminism
Pivotal to Caryl Churchill's What If If Only (2021) is the ghost of a democratic future that never happened. Framed by What If If Only, if-only yearnings for a democratic future are seminal to this Element with its primary attentions to the feminist, socialist and ecological values of Churchill's theatre. Arguing for the triangulation of the latter, the study elicits insights into: the feeling structures of Churchill's plays; reparative strategie…
Social Housing in Performance
Reviewed by: Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage by Katie Beswick Elaine Aston SOCIAL HOUSING IN PERFORMANCE: THE ENGLISH COUNCIL ESTATE ON AND OFF STAGE. By Katie Beswick. Methuen Drama Engage series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019; pp. 220. Details of my early childhood years on a northern council estate in England feel very distant these days: hard to recall with any accuracy. Yet, as I read Katie…
Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies
Feeling the Loss of Feminism
This essay disinters Blasted, the highly controversial debut play by Sarah Kane, from a masculinist cult of "in-yer-face-ism" in order to propose a genealogy of contemporary women's playwriting on the British stage characterized by an experiential drive to feeling the loss of feminism. Taking Blasted as a seminal point of reference, an experiential genealogy of women's writing is constructed by looking back at work by Rebecca Prichard and Judy Up…
The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill
"Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, re…
Staging International Feminisms
This is a landmark anthology of international feminist theatre research. A three-part structure orientates readers through Cartographies of feminist critical navigations of the global arena; the stagi
Making a Spectacle Out of Herself
Drawing on Mary Russo’s theorization of ‘female grotesques’, this article analyses Take a Peek! – a circus, fairground-styled ‘freak’ show by British performance artist, Bobby Baker. While making a display of or a spectacle out of herself can be argued for all of Baker’s work, Take a Peek!, the third show in her ‘Daily Life’ series, is especially concerned with ‘woman’ on display. The article argues that in Take a Peek! Baker turns herself into a…
Staging Femininities
This book presents a refreshingly honest account of theory and performance practice, one that is prepared to engage with the difficulties, frustrations, and excitement of theorizing practice and to practice theorizing theory. The study is unusual insofar as it narrows the focus on practice to just three practitioners, or more specifically to three performances: Rose English's The Double Wedding, Bobby Baker's How to Shop, and Annie Sprinkle's Pos…
Hotel (review)
The Verge (review)
Daniels in the Lion's Den
Writing her introduction to sixth volume in Methuen's Plays By Women series, Mary Remnant focussed on British playwright Daniels as one of very few-some would say most notorious--of women playwrights in Britain to have reached mainstream audiences.' Remnant cited Daniels's reputation, created by critics, as venom-spitting virago of radical feminist theatre, but went on to argue that it is precisely critical reactions to her visibility as woman wr…
A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre
Feeling the Loss of Feminism
This essay disinters Blasted, the highly controversial debut play by Sarah Kane, from a masculinist cult of "in-yer-face-ism" in order to propose a genealogy of contemporary women's playwriting on the British stage characterized by an experiential drive to feeling the loss of feminism. Taking Blasted as a seminal point of reference, an experiential genealogy of women's writing is constructed by looking back at work by Rebecca Prichard and Judy Up…
A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre
Daniels in the Lion's Den
Writing her introduction to sixth volume in Methuen's Plays By Women series, Mary Remnant focussed on British playwright Daniels as one of very few-some would say most notorious--of women playwrights in Britain to have reached mainstream audiences.' Remnant cited Daniels's reputation, created by critics, as venom-spitting virago of radical feminist theatre, but went on to argue that it is precisely critical reactions to her visibility as woman wr…
Hotel (review)
The Verge (review)
Staging Femininities
This book presents a refreshingly honest account of theory and performance practice, one that is prepared to engage with the difficulties, frustrations, and excitement of theorizing practice and to practice theorizing theory. The study is unusual insofar as it narrows the focus on practice to just three practitioners, or more specifically to three performances: Rose English's The Double Wedding, Bobby Baker's How to Shop, and Annie Sprinkle's Pos…
Making a Spectacle Out of Herself
Drawing on Mary Russo’s theorization of ‘female grotesques’, this article analyses Take a Peek! – a circus, fairground-styled ‘freak’ show by British performance artist, Bobby Baker. While making a display of or a spectacle out of herself can be argued for all of Baker’s work, Take a Peek!, the third show in her ‘Daily Life’ series, is especially concerned with ‘woman’ on display. The article argues that in Take a Peek! Baker turns herself into a…
Staging International Feminisms
This is a landmark anthology of international feminist theatre research. A three-part structure orientates readers through Cartographies of feminist critical navigations of the global arena; the stagi
The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill
"Caryl Churchill's plays are internationally performed, studied and acclaimed by practitioners, theatre scholars, critics and audiences alike. With fierce imagination the plays dramatise the anxieties and terrors of contemporary life. This Companion presents new scholarship on Churchill's extraordinary and ground-breaking work. Chapters explore a cluster of major plays in relation to pressing social topics - ecological crisis, sexual politics, re…
Feeling the Loss of Feminism
This essay disinters Blasted, the highly controversial debut play by Sarah Kane, from a masculinist cult of "in-yer-face-ism" in order to propose a genealogy of contemporary women's playwriting on the British stage characterized by an experiential drive to feeling the loss of feminism. Taking Blasted as a seminal point of reference, an experiential genealogy of women's writing is constructed by looking back at work by Rebecca Prichard and Judy Up…
Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies
Social Housing in Performance
Reviewed by: Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage by Katie Beswick Elaine Aston SOCIAL HOUSING IN PERFORMANCE: THE ENGLISH COUNCIL ESTATE ON AND OFF STAGE. By Katie Beswick. Methuen Drama Engage series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2019; pp. 220. Details of my early childhood years on a northern council estate in England feel very distant these days: hard to recall with any accuracy. Yet, as I read Katie…
Caryl Churchill's Eco-Socialist Feminism
Pivotal to Caryl Churchill's What If If Only (2021) is the ghost of a democratic future that never happened. Framed by What If If Only, if-only yearnings for a democratic future are seminal to this Element with its primary attentions to the feminist, socialist and ecological values of Churchill's theatre. Arguing for the triangulation of the latter, the study elicits insights into: the feeling structures of Churchill's plays; reparative strategie…
Art (9 works) · Theatre and Performance Studies (7 works) · History (5 works) · History (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · Visual arts (4 works) · Art history (3 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works)