ABSTRACT
By engaging professional wrestling explicitly through the fields of theatre and performance studies, the chapters in this volume develop an updated methodology for the study of professional wrestling. Much of the existing pro wrestling scholarship has employed theatrical parlance or loosely acknowledged the theatricality of professional wrestling. Beginning with Roland Barthes’s semiotic analysis of the “spectacle of excess” in his 1957 Mythologies, theatre and performance have often been employed in studies of wrestling largely as a way to mark the form as somehow other than sport, but only rarely as a particular performance form.
