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Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English from c.1970-2005
Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English from c.1970-2005
This project on the modern reception of classical texts was set up to
document and analyse the upsurge of interest in Greek and Roman
material which has been a feature of the late twentieth century and
continues into the twenty first. This cultural remodelling and
reimagining has often coincided with times of social and political
crisis: conflict; resistance; trauma; emancipation; exploration of old
and new identities. It also has a strong aesthetic energy. The ancient
texts provide a springboard from which creative practitioners can forge
their own techniques; the texts represent traditions from which the new
creators can grow their work and against which they can contend.
Cultural historians of the future will look back on the late
twentieth and early twenty first centuries as a time of cultural shift.
The ways in which the texts, performances and ideas of Greece and Rome
have been characterised, interpreted, dismembered, reworded and
rewritten represent one strand in these global changes. Because Greek
and Roman antiquity is a part of many cultural traditions the uses made
of it provide an index for comparison across place and time. Using
antiquity as a field for playing with and thinking through difficult and
threatening issues allows a critical distance that can cast an
illuminating light on modernity as well as antiquity.
The drama database and the poetry research document evidence that is
fundamental to the critical assessment of the aesthetic impact and the
cultural hinterland of Greek and Roman material in Anglophone theatre
and literature c. 1970 – c. 2005. It preserves detail that will
contribute to analysis of large issues of social, political and artistic
change. The case studies and data bases will provide a corpus of
material to which cultural historians will be able to refer in the
future – for example when they assess the contribution made by classical
receptions to constructs of cultural memory, temporality and identity
in a key period of trauma, fracture and change in the last part of the
twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
Because we aim to provide data that will be used by others who have
varying investigative priorities and research questions, we place
particular emphasis on the transparency of the methods and categories we
use. In addition to identifying and preserving primary sources (many of
which document performances that would otherwise be ephemeral) we hope
that we shall also have provided a snapshot of how classical reception
scholarship operated at this particular time and place (thus also in
itself becoming a primary source).
Possibly, but not without knowing who you are. Also, there ought to be an unsubscribe link on each of those emails.
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