Review: Christina Wald. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: Christina Wald's book is an ambitious, well-researched and meticulous study focusing, according to the jacket blurb, on "the interaction of theatrical performance, psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory, and the theory of gender performativity." Wald's interdisciplinary approach covers substantial ground indeed, as she conducts a detailed analysis of ten recent Anglophone plays underpinned by an expert application of an impressive array of secondary sources, ranging from Karl Abraham to Slavoj Žižek. Structured into three substantial chapters preceded by a theoretical introduction that clarifies methodological issues, technical terms and introduces the key framework of performativity theory, the book places the three maladies under a historical and conceptual focus and establishes firm connections between these and theatrical case studies.