"A gauntlet thrown at the reader’s feet”
"A gauntlet thrown at the reader’s feet”

Summary/Abstract: This review assesses the long-awaited English edition of Otakar Zich’s Aesthetics of the Dramatic Art: Theoretical Dramaturgy (1931), published in 2024 (General editor David Drozd, translated by Pavel Drábek and Tomáš P. Kačer). It highlights the decade-long Czech initiative to make Zich’s seminal but complex writings accessible to an international readership through the Theatre Theory Reader (2016) and related projects. The review situates Zich’s inductive, spectator-centred theory within the intellectual tradition of the Prague Linguistic Circle and early twentieth-century European performance thought. It commends the translators’ methodological clarity and the volume’s dual structure—Introduction and Afterword—for enabling critical engagement with Zich’s intricate aesthetic system, now restored as a foundational text of modern theatre theory.

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