Theatre and national identity : re-imagining conceptions of nation
- Submitting institution
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The University of Warwick
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 10122
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Routledge
- ISBN
- 9780415822992
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
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-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- With a broad international scope encompassing contributions about countries in Europe, Asia and Africa, this collection explores how playwrights, directors, and theatre-makers re-stage, re-work or create ‘national’ plays, performances, theatrical forms, or theatre spaces to critically engage with conceptions of nation, nationalism, and national identity in moments of transition or radical change. Holdsworth was the sole editor for the collection, she identified and invited contributors and wrote an extensive contextualising introduction outlining its aims and conceptual parameters. The introduction makes the case that preoccupations with globalization, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, whilst welcome, have a tendency to prematurely overlook the persistent and deeply felt resonance of national repertoires, narratives, aesthetic forms and performance strategies. It argues that theatre is a productive space to examine in terms of how representational forms replay, rework and contest the status of the nation or to reassess the politics of belonging that brings in questions of race, religion, gender and migratory experience. Holdsworth’s aim with the collection was to place divergent national contexts, distinct historical periods and different theatrical practices in dialogue in order to examine how the ‘national’ is evident, figured, and reinterpreted in multiple contexts and in differing social and political circumstances. The result of this approach is that a reader is able to dig into specific national contexts, but to also trace connections and points of divergence across these contexts. In addition to this Holdsworth contributed a chapter to the collection on both the iconic and ambivalent cultural status of Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood (1954) in Wales and the ways that contemporary playwrights re-assessed his legacy, influence and reverberations at a point when Wales was rethinking its identity in the light of political devolution in the late 1990s.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -