Original Title: Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse, Wilhelm Fink, Munich, 1977

After publication in the Series Mansions of Marvin Carlson’s Theories of the Theatre (Vols. 1-3), we continued by publishing another valuable book of theatre theory which is of fundamental value for national culture, science and art.

Drama,… by Manfred Pfister, professor at the Berlin Freie University, has gone through as many as eight editions because it has become the basic text-book for students of drama and teachers of drama and theatre at German universities. Primarily relying on the rich experience of the German theory of communications and the theory of reception, Manfred Pfister gives a systematic, theoretically well-based, and even more importantly, usable model for analysis of drama texts. The book has 450 pages and is divided into eight chapters: Foreword, Drama and the Dramatic, Drama and the Theatre, Transmitting the Message, Speech Communication, Personality and Personage, Time and Space Structure, and Conclusion. The book also contains a detailed list of primary and secondary reference literature and the author’s Index, facilitating finding one’s way through Pfister’s exceptional analytical theory of drama and the theatre.

As a fundamental work for the profession, this book is intended for theatre critics, theatre theoreticians and, particularly, students of theatre theory, dramaturgy, and high school teachers. The University of Zagreb confirmed the book’s worth by granting it text-book status.

Dr. Marijan Bobinac, professor of German Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, translated Drama into Croatian, and the reviewers were Dr. Victor Žmegać, Dr. Boris Senker and Dr. Nikola Batušić.

Drama was published with funding assistance from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, the Ministry of Science, and the Bayerische Staatskanzlei from Munich.