Representing reality in terms of secure, familiar centres and dangerous, lesser known peripheries is one of the most elementary human cognitive instincts. However, we live in a world where this established division is becoming more and more problematic. One person's periphery can be another's centre, and many simple geographies of the world and of the mind, clearly separating the known from the unknown, have become obsolete. How can one reconcile this complexity with the fact that human thinking cannot escape the centre/periphery dichotomy? How is it possible to find one's way in a world in...

The book presents post-war British historical drama not only as a phenomenon within literature and theatre, but also as an alternative form of representing the past, not as much competing with historiography as complementing it. The author shows how some of the central concerns of late twentieth-century methodology of history were also crucial for the historical drama of that time by applying Hayden White's classification of categories determining the shape of historical writing to the plays of Robert Bolt, David Hare, Howard Barker and Tom Stoppard. The plays discussed in the book offer not...