Comparative Drama is an academic journal boasting a quarterly publication frequency, which has been administered by the Western Michigan University Department of English since 1967. Its editorial board is constituted of academics from a wide range of disparate institutions, from Stanford, Duke, and Emory, to Freie Universität in Berlin. The journal is edited by Elizabeth A. Bradburn—Associate Professor of English at WMU. As of this writing, over twenty years of Comparative Drama can be accessed by Tennessee Tech students and faculty via the Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library online database directory. From the directory, scholars may select the “Arts and Humanities Database” by ProQuest. It may interest students of Literature and Drama that, according to the MLA “Directory of Periodicals”, this publication concerns itself with “drama studies which are international in spirit and interdisciplinary in scope. While medieval drama is a special interest, articles may focus on drama of any period from antiquity to the present” (MLA International Bibliography Directory of Periodicals). This journal has a modest circulation of about three hundred, to various institutions and individuals.
While Comparative Drama does not accept unsolicited book reviews, reviews make up a majority of this publication’s content, with an average of forty submitted and published annually. Scholarly articles, meanwhile, only make up about twenty to twenty-five of Comparative Drama’s annual titles. These are chosen from a pool of submissions averaging eighty to one hundred per year. Submissions are published according to the Chicago Manual of Style, and authors can expect to wait up to two months after submission for notice of the journal’s publication decision.
Comparative Drama invites authors who have been previously published by the journal to submit again, however they adhere to a policy that limits authors to one publication per three years. Authors are given a suggested length for submissions of twenty-five to thirty typed, double-spaced pages—or 7,500 to 10,000 words—and they are asked to avoid jargon. Interestingly, while two-hundred fifty-word abstracts are requested with each submission, and while abstracts are included on the ProQuest “Arts and Humanities Database”, they are not published along with the articles in the journal, itself. Conveniently for authors, the Comparative Drama’s homepage at the WMU website includes an electronic “style sheet”, which can be found under the “Submissions Guidelines” section.
Students and scholars of drama can expect to find a vast and meandering range of topics discussed within Comparative Drama’s contents, and throughout its half-century of volumes; however, the works of William Shakespeare seem to occupy a disproportionate amount of space upon its pages. And yet, this may simply reflect that particular author’s disproportionate influence upon this field of study. For example, in the Winter 1999/2000 volume of Comparative Drama, Cynthia Marshall reviews Gillian Murray Kendall’s Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays, wherein the reviewer analyses the complier’s uses of the theorical lens of “New Historicism”.
This journal’s consideration of the “New Historicism” mode of critical theory is likewise apparent in the article “O’Neill and Jaime: A Survivor’s Tale” by Michael Hinden, published in the Winter 2001-2002 volume. Therein, Hinden shows how the tumultuous life of Eugene O’Neill’s brother Jamie had influenced the playwright’s works—from Desire Under the Elms, to the more obvious Long Day’s Journey into Night.
But, for students and scholars looking for more international and diverse fare, the journal does not fall short of its stated, broad scope of interest. In “Staging Queer Marxism in the Age of State Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Nation in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar’s Kadin Erkekleşince (When Woman Becomes Masculine)” author Rüstem Ertuğ Altinay explores how the eponymous play represents how certain socio-sexual particularities that were characteristic of the late Ottoman Empire engender “the conditions of (im)possibility of a queer Marxist feminism.” With titles ranging broadly in focus, and by engaging texts from all different eras and regions using widely disparate lenses of critical theory, Comparative Drama lends itself to the eclectic dramatic scholar seeking to peruse through a sea of disparate topics.
Works Cited
“Comparative Drama,” MLA International Bibliography Directory of Periodicals. EBSCO Industries, Inc. 2019. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/ehost/flatdetail?vid=3&sid=f9926f04-50c0-44fc-a852-d8ddaf5d34f3%40sdc-v-sessmgr01
“Submission Guidelines”. Comparative Drama. Western Michigan University, https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/policies.html.
Cankara, Murat. “‘May a Wasp Sting Your Tongue!”: The Armenian Stereotype in Ottoman Popular Performances from the Empire to the Nation-State”, Comparative Drama. vol. 52, iss. 4, 2019, pp. 215-241. ProQuest. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/publicationissue/C55DFFF07AE94D58PQ/$B/1/Comparative+Drama$3b+Kalamazoo/02018Y10Y01$23Fall+2018$2fWinter+2019$3b++Vol.+52+$283$2f4$29/$N?accountid=28833.
Eskin, Catherine R. “Review: Shakespearean Power and Punishment: A Volume of Essays”. Comparative Drama, vol. 33, iss. 4, 1999, pp. 515–519. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/docview/211697873/22861F2304C443F9PQ/7?accountid=28833.
Hinden, Michael. “O’Neill and Jamie: A Survivor’s Tale”. Comparative Drama. vol. 35, iss. 3, 2001, pp. 435-445. ProQuest. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/docview/211715021/2CEAAF0984A4B9DPQ/11?accountid=28833.
Mazzaro, Jerome. “Shakespeare’s “Books of Memory”: 1 and 2 Henry VI”, Compartive Drama. vol. 35, iss. 3, 2001, pp. 393-414. ProQuest. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/docview/211698648/2CEAAF0984A4B9DPQ/9?accountid=28833.
Robinson, James E. “Caribbean Caliban: Shifting the “I” of the Storm”. Comparative Drama, vol 33, iss. 4, 1999, pp. 431-453. ProQuest, https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/docview/211705761/22861F2304C443F9PQ/3?accountid=28833.
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay. “Staging Queer Marxism in the Age of State Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Nation in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s Kadın Erkekleşince (When Woman Becomes Masculine)”. Comparative Drama. vol. 52, iss. 4, 2019, pp. 243-273. ProQuest. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.tntech.edu/artshumanities/publicationissue/C55DFFF07AE94D58PQ/$B/1/Comparative+Drama$3b+Kalamazoo/02018Y10Y01$23Fall+2018$2fWinter+2019$3b++Vol.+52+$283$2f4$29/$N?accountid=28833.
English Research Sources 