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To call something modern is to assert something fundamental about the social, cultural, economic and technical sophistication of that thing, over and against what has come before.
A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of theatre and performance in their social and material contexts from the late 19th century through the early 2000s, emphasizing key developments and trends that both exemplify and trouble the various meanings of the term 'modern', and the identity of modernist theatre and performance.
Highly illustrated with 40 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Series Preface
Editor’s Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Impossible Modern Age
Kim Solga, Western University, Canada
1 Institutional Frameworks: Theatre, State, and Market in Modern Urban Performance
Michael McKinnie, Queen Mary University of London, UK
2 Social Functions: Consumers and Producers
Nicholas Ridout, Queen Mary University of London, UK
3 Sexuality and Gender: New Stories and New Spaces on the Modern Stage
Kirsten Pullen, Texas A&M University, USA
4 The Environment of Theatre: ‘Home’ in the Modern Age
Kim Solga, Western University, Canada and Joanne Tompkins, The University of Queensland, Australia
5 Circulations: Visual Sovereignty, Transmotion, and Tribalography
Jill Carter, University of Tornoto, Canada, Heather Davis-Fisch,University of the Fraser Valley, USA and Ric Knowles, University of Guelph, Canada
6 Interpretations: The Stakes of Audience Interpretation in Twentieth-Century Political Theatre
Dassia N. Posner, Northwestern University, USA
7 Communities of Production: A Materialist Reading with an Offstage View
Christin Essin,Vanderbilt University, USA and Marlis Schweitzer, York University, Canada
8 Genres and Repertoires: Redressing the Nation in Ireland and Japan
Michelle Liu Carriger,University of California, Los Angeles , USA and Aoife Monks, Queen Mary University of London, UK
9 Technologies of Performance: Machinic Staging and Corporeal Choreographies
Ashley Ferro-Murray, University of California, Berkeley, USA and Timothy Murray, Cornell University, USA
10 Knowledge Transmission: Media and Memory
Sarah Bay-Cheng, Bowdoin College, USA
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Kim Solga is Associate Professor of English and Writing Studies at Western University, Canada.
Summary
To call something modern is to assert something fundamental about the social, cultural, economic and technical sophistication of that thing, over and against what has come before. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of theatre and performance in their social and material contexts from the late 19th century through the early 2000s, emphasizing key developments and trends that both exemplify and trouble the various meanings of the term ‘modern’, and the identity of modernist theatre and performance.
Highly illustrated with 40 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.
Foreword
The definitive overview of the cultural history of theatre in the modern world
