The Theatre Of The Absurd. 3rd Edition

The 'Theatre of the Absurd' was bound to work its way into our language as a catch-phrase, and from the start Martin Esslin's ground-breaking book looked set to become the definitive study of these playwrights who have dramatised so powerfully what is still the most genuinely representative attitude of our time: the meaningless absurdity of the human condition. With admirable lucidity Esslin shows how Samuel Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter and others have confronted a world in which there is no communication, where man - cut off from his traditional religious and metaphysical roots - flounders about in a purposeless void, shorn of all certainties. Martin Esslin's book is as readable and stimulating as it is fluent and illuminating. It is a classic of its kind.