Discuss the Existentialist Philosophy and its reflection in the Absurd Theatre.
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In this paper, my aim is to give a brief introduction of existentialism and to show how the Theatre of the Absurd has derived from and is influenced by the existential philosophy of Sartre and Camus. I have also made an attempt to elucidate the distinctive features of the Theatre of the Absurd by making a passing reference to some of the representative plays that belong to this genre.
Existentialism was formally introduced in the works of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger and can be traced to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Franz Kafka. But existentialism as a movement became popular in the mid-twentieth century through the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.