When a nation wants to reconnect with a sense of national identity, its cultural celebrations, including its theatre, are often tinged with nostalgia for a cultural high point in its history. Leaders often try to create a ?neo-classical? cultural identity. Artificially returning to an imagined pinnacle, however, can fail to take into account new aspects of national identity, such as the infusion of other cultures and languages. This collection of essays discusses the relationship between political power and the construction or subversion of cultural identity. The collection takes a wide...

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference. This edition includes papers from the 33rd annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include Bernard Shaw's use of gardens and libraries in Widowers' Houses, Northern Ireland emergency law in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City, cannibalism and surrogation in Hamletmachine, Sergei Eisenstein's and Charlie Chaplin's use of...

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. This new volume represents a selection of the best research presented at the 34th international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference held in Los Angeles in 2010. Topics covered include metatheatrical experiments and adaptations of Greek tragedy, early Soviet orientalist plays, the working class on the 1920s Broadway stage, Tennessee Williams's grandfather as character model, psychotherapy on stage, and African American musicals, among other topics. Reviews of eight selected books are also...

d104 & Presentation is an annual anthology of essays devoted to all aspects of theatre and performance scholarship. This new volume represents a selection of the best research presented at the 35th international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles. The essays include innovative detective work on Aristophanes's and Aeschylus's plays and discussions of topics including Joe Orton's plays as social protest against the power of psychiatry and the asylum, George Eliot's controversial description of the burlesque spirit as "fodder for degraded appetites," and...