What can artists learn from theatre scholars when it comes to performing historical works on stage today? What can theatre scholars learn from today’s artists when it comes to understanding the works and practices of the past? How is the experience of modern spectators affected by attending performances in historic theatres? And how, aesthetically, do we experience the reconstruction of productions from the remote past?
The essays in this anthology try to answer these questions by initiating a dialogue between academic and artistic research. They reflect a desire to develop and expand the methods traditionally used by theatre historians, presenting a variety of angles on today’s performances in historic theatres and on today’s attempts to revive theatrical practices of the past.
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Framing the Nation, Claiming the Hemisphere examines the national and transnational imagination in travel reports by American authors written between 1770 and 1830. Its range is from John and William Bartram’s pre-revolutionary travelogues and Jonathan Carver’s exploratory report on his journey in the Great Lakes region (first published 1778), to early nineteenth-century reports, such as Anne Newport Royall’s Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (1826) and William Duane’s A Visit to Colombia (1826). The chapters of the monograph concentrate on writing about journeys to the North American ‘interior‘, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The primary sources were written between the beginning of the struggle against British rule, following the end of the French and Indian War, and the beginning of Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The decades between 1770 and 1830 were times of shifting colonial boundaries, nation-building, and emergent discourses of collective identification in North America. The study reads travel writing in the context of the identity-generating discourses of nation-building, imperialism, anti-colonialism, and cosmopolitanism.
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The indigenous religious traditions of the peoples of the Arctic and Sub-Arctic areas were and are very diverse. Despite their diversity, these traditions have often been presented as similar. In resent research, however, variations and local characteristics have gained increasing attention. The emphasis in this volume is exactly on differences and on nuances. Therefore, critical analyses of earlier research, different forms of source criticism, and comparative methods that look for more than just similarities are all applied as essential analytical tools.
Some of the chapters focus on aspects of the traditional cultures of these northern peoples, others are critical readings of research about them. The themes of the chapters that deal with traditional practices and narratives vary from hostage traditions to ancestor mountains, from bear rituals and sweat baths to the ritual drum. The research historical chapters discuss source critical and terminological problems, or consider the contributions of scholars in the emergence of what eventually become identified as religions.
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