bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Abbey Theatre and the Irish State
Authors: Arrington Lauren
Published: September 2016

The aesthetic principles of education and representation that Yeats and Gregory set out at the founding of the Abbey Theatre enabled the directorate to cultivate a relationship with the state that ensured the theatre’s place as the Irish National Theatre. Yet this was a relationship that demanded compromises on both sides—in the negotiation for a state subsidy, finally granted in 1925, in issues of censorship over controversial plays such asThe Plough and the Starsin 1926, and in the uneasy relationship with the Fianna Fáil government that came to power in 1932. Even so, at least during Yeats’s lifetime, the Abbey directors were able to resist the complete ideological co-option of the theatre, and any compromises to artistic freedom were made willingly in order to ensure the continued alliance of the theatre and the state.
Design and Direction to 1960
Authors: Reynolds Paige
Published: September 2016

Early Abbey staging and design was extremely simple, partly enforced by the limitations of their resources. Yeats’s ambitious experiments with the screens of Gordon Craig came to nothing. Initially, the Gate Theatre was established self-consciously as a theatrical alternative to the Abbey, open to European aesthetics, and concentrated on stage production and design, ideas articulated and exemplified by Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards in their design and direction work. However, the chapter argues that this conventional narrative overlooks the design work of Tanya Moiseiwitsch at the Abbey Theatre in the 1930s, which showed a strong influence of expressionism. When the view of Irish theatre is further broadened to include pageants and public performances which are also a feature of mid-century, it becomes clear that Irish theatre of the time was far from being an unrelieved vista of peasant realism.
Women and Irish Theatre before 1960
Authors: Leeney Cathy
Published: September 2016

Although Lady Gregory was one of the first directors of the Abbey and one of its most popular and prolific playwrights, Irish theatre in the popular perception has been seen as dominated by men. Taking the disputed authorship of the pivotal play,Cathleen ni Houlihan(co-authored by Gregory and Yeats, but long attributed to Yeats), as an emblem of this eclipse of women in Irish theatre, this chapter addresses the important part played by actors such as Sara Allgood and actor-directors like Ria Mooney and Shelah Richards, as well as recognizing that playwrights such as Alice Milligan, Teresa Deevy, and Dorothy McArdle were important figures in shaping the styles and concerns of the theatre of the period. The resulting reappraisal of the period helps us to see Irish theatre history differently, focusing on the alternatives so often articulated by women of the time.
The Little Theatres of the 1950s
Authors: Pilkington Lionel
Published: September 2016

Irish theatre in the 1950s, when the Abbey was in exile at the Queen’s, is often thought of a period in the doldrums, but in fact there were quite a number of exciting and adventurous little theatres working at this time. The best-known is the Pike, with its landmark productions ofThe Quare FellowandWaiting for Godot, but there was also the Lyric in Belfast with its commitment to Yeats’s plays, the Gas Company Theatre Company, and the Lantern bringing new and different forms of drama to Ireland. This chapter explores the impact of such ventures and the extent to which they helped renovate the Irish theatrical culture, serving as sites of critique of the dominant culture of the time. Of particular importance here is the 1957 production of Tennessee Williams’sThe Rose Tattooat the Pike Theatre, which was the subject of court prosecution .
Brian Friel and Field Day
Authors: Richtarik Marilynn
Published: September 2016

When Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theatre Company to stage Friel’sTranslationsin 1980, they created a company arguably more conscious of its own symbolic value, and its own place in history, than any since the Abbey. Field Day soon developed into a wider cultural enterprise, playing a significant role in setting the terms of cultural debate in the 1980s, for which it was both vigorously supported and sharply criticized. The terms of this debate shaped the response to Field Day’s theatrical productions: Friel’sTranslationsand its companion piece,The Communication Cord, as well as key works by other writers, notably Thomas Kilroy’sDouble Crossand Stewart Parker’sPentecost. Drawing extensively on manuscript materials that have only recently entered the public domain, the Field Day initiative and Friel’s role in it are the subject of this chapter.
From Druid/Murphy to
Authors: Troupe Shelley
Published: September 2016

During the same years that Brian Friel was associated with Field Day, Tom Murphy began working closely with the Galway-based Druid Theatre company. In its early years, Druid had established its reputation primarily with productions of Synge’s work; however, beginning in the mid-1980s, the company began to work closely with Murphy, whoseBailegangairewould be one of the most important plays of the decade. The association between writer and company culminated in 2012 with the DruidMurphy cycle, a production of three of Murphy’s major plays that toured internationally to critical acclaim. Examining the plays, their production and marketing, this chapter explores the relationship between the playwright and the company, as it went through a series of distinct phases, leading to DruidMurphy, one of the most important Irish theatre events of its time.
Reinscribing the Classics, Ancient and Modern
Authors: Mahony Christina Hunt
Published: September 2016

Translation and adaptation have long had a distinctive visibility on the Irish stage, with the translator as much to the fore as the original playwright in the ascription of authorship. Two contemporary Irish playwrights have had careers to some extent defined by their sustained engagement with non-English-language writers: Friel with Chekhov, and McGuinness with Ibsen. As Friel does not know Russian, nor McGuinness Norwegian, what is being done is adaptation, not translation. It was Thomas Kilroy who initiated this tradition of Irish ‘versions’ withThe Seagullin1981. However, these writers are not unique, and distinctively Irish translations have extended to Greek tragedy, with versions ofAntigonebecoming important in Irish theatre culture, particularly during the Troubles in the 1980s. This chapter considers what is distinctive about Irish adaptations/translations of foreign works and the reasons for their international success.
Irish Drama since the 1990s
Authors: Wallace Clare
Published: September 2016

While writers such as Friel and Murphy seemed to provide a certain continuity in the closing years of the twentieth century, a new generation of writers emerged in the 1990s for whom the Irish dramatic tradition seemed less an inheritance than a foil to be played against (or with) or, in some cases, an irrelevance. For instance, while Martin McDonagh’s work was sometimes associated with British ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of the 1990s, to some commentators his work made more sense as a subversion of an earlier Irish tradition. In the case of Conor McPherson, the breakdown of a community that made a shared theatre culture possible was registered in a turn to monologue, while writers such as Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh showed a freedom of dramatic form and a set of dramatic concerns reflecting immersion in a mediatized, globalized late modernity.
Shadow and Substance
Authors: Sihra Melissa
Published: September 2016

In spite of the very important role of women in the development of Irish theatre through the twentieth century, their contribution has continued to be marginalized, with ‘women’s drama’ set off against an implicit male norm. This was still obvious in the Abbey Theatre’s centenary programme, in which no play by a woman featured on the theatre’s main stage. The work of Charabanc Theatre Company, a women’s collective, and the highly successful plays of Marie Jones emerging from that company can be contrasted with the male-dominated Field Day in terms of a disparity of critical attention. Marina Carr, the Irish woman playwright best known internationally, in spite of the strong gender concerns of her plays, has been reluctant to identify herself as ‘feminist’ because of its associations. It has only been in the twenty-first century that the work of women playwrights and directors has been accepted as part of mainstream theatre .
Global Beckett
Authors: McDonald Rónán
Published: September 2016

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.
Irish Theatre and the United States
Authors: Harrington John
Published: September 2016

Since well before the Abbey Theatre set its sights on America in 1911, Irish theatre has had strong ties with American theatre culture. Over the course of the twentieth century, touring productions of Irish plays have continued to have an impact on American theatre culture. From Eugene O’Neill on, Irish ethnicity within the US has been explored and defined by Irish-American theatre-makers, who have taken Irish theatre in directions that sometimes diverge in significant ways from Irish theatre produced in Ireland. At the same time, as Sam Shepard’s recent collaboration with the Abbey Theatre suggests, American theatre has had a notable impact on Irish stages. This chapter will look at the complex interactions linking Irish-produced theatre in America, indigenous Irish American theatre, and the role of American theatre in shaping Irish theatre culture.
W. B. Yeats and Rituals of Performance
Authors: Brown Terence
Published: September 2016

Though best known as a poet, Yeats gave much of his time, energy and commitment throughout his career to writing plays, running the Abbey and thinking about forms of theatre. Central to both his theory and practice is the concept of theatre as performance ritual. He experimented with many different forms in the pursuit of this goal: the Shakespearean poetic drama ofOn Baile’s Strand, the first of a cycle of plays centred on the Irish mythological character of Cuchulain; the Noh-based plays for dancers includingAt the Hawk’s WellandThe Dreaming of the Bones; the late minimalist dream play ofPurgatory. This chapter, covering the full range of theCollected Plays, unpacks Yeats’s evolving ideas of theatre and his sometimes frustrating efforts made to realise them.
Modernism and Irish Theatre 1900–1940
Authors: Cave Richard
Published: September 2016

Modernism, defined here initially in its key features across the art forms, was a strong countercurrent to the dominant style of realism in Irish theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century. This is particularly evident in the dance dramas of W. B. Yeats and his other experiments with non-realist dramatic forms. Séan O’Casey, in his controversial playThe Silver Tassieand later works, drew on the bold techniques of expressionism. Denis Johnston, who emerged as a playwright from the 1920s Dublin Drama League, gave the Gate Theatre one of its key early successes inThe Old Lady Says No!. And it was in the Gate, with Hilton Edwards as director and Michéal Mac Liammóir as designer and actor, that Irish audiences were exposed to the internationally influential style of presentational staging.
Beyond Satire
Authors: Crespi John A.
Published: September 2016

Zhang Guangyu’s illustrated taleJourney to the West in Cartoons(1945) has been described as a colorful, whimsical, but also trenchant lampoon of bankrupt politics and society under Nationalist rule at the close of the War of Resistance against Japan.Journeyis indeed a masterful example of satire, but it is also a remarkable work ofmanhua, a genre of verbal-visual art often referred to as “cartoon” that flourished in China’s treaty ports in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter proposes that when viewed in conversation with the history of China’smanhua, Zhang’s fanciful allegory describes a symbiosis betweenmanhuaand the popular print genre of the pictorial magazine, the medium in whichmanhuathrived during the interwar years.
The Allegory of Time and Space
Authors: Pang Laikwan
Published: September 2016

How did writers in Maoist China assume their role as authors, torn between self-expression and the political demands of the Party? How should we read the literary creations produced at a time in which literary works were not always candid expressions of the authors, but were manifestations of complex negotiations and self-censorship? This chapter provides a case study to illustrate these quandaries, focusing specifically on Tian Han’s historical dramas produced during the late 1950s. It illustrate how Tian Han tried to use historical and intercultural allegories to come to terms with contemporary happenings and offers an analysis of a rarely studied but extremely representative work,Princess Wencheng, that embodies the struggles of the Party and the Han intellectuals with the Tibetan problems during that time.
Wartime Taiwan
Authors: Chang Sung-sheng Yvonne
Published: September 2016

Taking midcentury wartime Taiwan literary production as an emblematic case study, and relying heavily on the diaries of Taiwan author Lü Heruo as a revealing window into the literary field during this period, this chapter examines the relationship between the sociopolitical backdrop against which this particular literary field emerged, on one hand, and the internal structural constitution of the literary field itself, on the other. Using a specific literary phenomenon in wartime Taiwan as material for a case study, and in dialogue with some recent scholarship on the Japanese colonization of the island, this chapter further argues that the putatively aberrant structural elements characteristic of this particular literary field are in fact quite common in the cultural history of modern East Asia.
Xiaolu Guo and the Contemporary Chinese Anglophone Novel
Authors: Kong Belinda
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines Xiaolu Guo as a paradigmatic writer of geopolitics, biopolitics, and capitalism in contemporary Chinese Anglophone fiction. The chapter first focuses onA Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Loversto rethink models of Anglophone writing. Against utopian conceptions of English as a privileged language of heterogeneity or hybridity,Dictionaryis analyzed in terms of biocapital and geopolitics, as a narrative of the Chinese migrant’s absorption into the Anglophone publishing industry and the Anglophone empire. The chapter then analyzesUFO in Her Eyesas representative of a recent turn in Chinese fiction toward issues of biocapital, the increasing entanglement of the communist state’s regulation of bodies with its capitalist goals. Unique among biocapitalist fiction, however,UFOfurther situates contemporary China in a global post-9/11 context of state surveillance and defense security. Guo’s novels, then, offer a distinctly instructive framework for comparative reflections on biopolitics, biocapital, and the global security state.
Representations of the Invisible
Authors: Song Mingwei
Published: September 2016

The marginalized genre of science fiction has experienced an unprecedented boom in China in recent years, a “new wave” of writing that reinvents the genre by infusing it with a new literary self-consciousness and a new social awareness and by representing the complex realities and fantasies of a changing China and a changing world. The discussion of Chinese science fiction in this chapter, with a focus on works by Han Song and Liu Cixin, centers on the representation of the invisible: science fiction as an invisible genre, the new wave’s representation of the “invisible” reality of China, and tropes of invisibility in the texts themselves. By working with and through invisibility, these texts transgress mainstream literary realism and official political discourse. The chapter ends with a coda featuring a brief discussion of the invisible “posthumans” among China’s migrant workers as featured in Chen Qiufan’s novelThe Waste Tide.
Leung Ping-kwan
Authors: Chow Rey
Published: September 2016

In a writing career that spanned nearly half a century, Leung Ping-kwan produced tens of volumes of poems, essays, short stories, novels, and newspaper columns, as well as literary, film, and cultural criticism. His versatility was evident in the experiments he undertook in different genres and in the moves he made between artistic creativity and scholarly study. Leung also collaborated with photographers, visual artists, musicians, choreographers, translators, and academics in various multimedia projects, proving with his own work the rich possibilities of partnership that lie between academic pursuits and society at large. A recurrent theme of Leung’s writings is the literary and artistic mode he refers to asshuqing, a term usually (but less than ideally) translated as “lyrical” or “lyricism.” This chapter offers observations about the connotations and implications of this, Leung’s beloved, mode, especially as it is imbricated with his approaches to space.
The Construction of the Modern Chinese Concept of (“drama”)
Authors: Xiaohong Xia
Published: September 2016

Roughly equivalent to the English worddrama, the modern Chinese termxijuis of relatively recent provenance. This chapter traces the etymology of this modern usage of the termxiju, looking in particular at the introduction of Western concepts of drama and performance conventions into China during the early modern period. It looks at the relationship between the modern concept ofxijuand a set of earlier Chinese terms that were used to refer to performance works, and concludes that the Sinification of the Western concept ofdramawas a very complicated process that involved the introduction of Western knowledge, the reconstruction of aesthetic categories, theater reform, the development of new theater, and the critique of old-style theater.
Historiography in the Chinese Twentieth Century
Authors: Saussy Haun , Zhaoguang GE
Published: September 2016

The modernist, critical turn in Chinese historiography in the first years of the twentieth century created space for new categories, narrative frameworks, and kinds of explanation. The generation of the 1910s and 1920s took advantage of this, offering new conceptions of the distant origins of Chinese civilization and suggesting different ways of narrating China’s development, one of which was the coexistence and interaction of ethnic groups. Under the pressure of Japanese invasion in the 1930s and the prominence of a Japanese historiography that made the differences among ethnicities seem greater than their union in the Chinese empire, Chinese history-writing reverted to a reverential attitude toward an immemorial “Chineseness.” The advent of a socialist government changed the balance. In more recent years, world history, economic history, and the rethinking of the “imagined community” have become prominent, as Chinese historians wrestle with different problems raised by coexistence in a global commons.
Structure and Rupture in Literary History and Historiography
Authors: Zhang Yingjin
Published: September 2016

In rethinking modern Chinese literary history, we may draw on insights from two relatively new approaches in the West: postmodern literary history as represented by the Harvard University Press’s “new history” series, and comparative literary history as realized in two multivolume literary histories on Central-Eastern Europe and Latin America, respectively. It is time to move research forward beyond the current divergence between a persistent lack of interest in Chinese literary history in English scholarship and an inundation of literary histories in Chinese. Recent calls in China for defamilarization and microhistories demonstrate the desire to break away from the orthodox model of comprehensive historiography, and a comparative examination of literary historiography in Chinese will further develop a new structural view of modern Chinese literary history in terms of rupture, diversity, and heterogeneity rather than the previous emphasis on continuity, singularity, and homogeneity.
Orientalism, Scientific Practice, and Popular Culture in Late Qing China
Authors: Isaacson Nathaniel
Published: September 2016

As the sequel to a translation of a translation, Xu Nianci’s “New Tales of Mr. Braggadocio” is a case study in the linguistic negotiations central to Lydia Liu’s reflections on translation. The story is marked by a double consciousness through which the narrator’s body and soul explore alternate explanations for evolution and scientific knowledge, thus engaging in many of the thematic and historical hallmarks of colonial modernity, situated at the junction of a number of intellectual realms. Thematically and linguistically, the text suggests a number of potential points of resistance to western epistemology, attempting to subsume science under the umbrella of Daoist cosmology. Especially prominent in the story is the degree to which the narrator’s resistance to Western science contrasts with his ready appropriation of the tenets of capitalist accumulation of wealth as his success in perfecting the techniques of “brain electricity” ultimately results in a global economic crisis.
Introduction
Authors: Rojas Carlos , Bachner Andrea
Published: September 2016

Anchored by an illustrative analysis of Malaysian Chinese author Ng Kim Chew’s 2001 short story “Kebei” [Inscribed Backs], this introduction lays out some of the central concerns of the volume as a whole. In particular, the chapter uses Ng’s story to reassess some common assumptions about what modern Chinese literature is, and how the category might alternatively be understood. In the process, the chapter structures its discussion around an analysis of an early definition of the Chinese termwen, meaning “marking,” “text,” or “culture/civilization”—using three different elements of this early definition to introduce the three parts of this edited volume. The volume is divided into three parts, on Structure, Taxonomy, and Methodology. Part I examines a set of structural elements that inform how texts are produced, distributed, and consumed; Part II focuses on issues of literary taxonomy, and particularly the historical, national, and formal groupings that comprise the category of modern Chinese literature; and Part III illustrates various analytical methodologies that may be used to interpret literary texts.
On Not Knowing
Authors: Hill Michael Gibbs
Published: September 2016

It is common knowledge that translation and translated literature played an important role in Chinese literature in the first decades of the twentieth century. The lack of resources needed to train individuals in languages such as Russian or even English and French, however, meant that many translations were made by translators who did not know the original language in which a source was written. Two important methods emerged for producing this type of translation: “tandem translation” (duiyi) and relay translation or retranslation (zhuanyi). Through a survey of the translation practices of Lin Shu (1852–1924) and his later rivals, including Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958) and Mao Dun (1896–1981), this chapter suggests that these practices offer an opportunity to think through not only some of the fundamental questions of translation in modern world literature but also the place of translation in academic scholarship on comparative literature.
Stopping the “Madness”
Authors: Maddux James E.
Published: September 2016

This chapter describes the traditional view of clinical psychology as a discipline and profession steeped in an “illness ideology” that has roots in clinical psychology’s early connections with psychiatry and medicine and limits clinical psychology to the study of what is worst and weakest about people rather than what is best and bravest about people. The historical, cultural, and professional causes of this ideology are discussed, emphasizing on the social construction and deconstruction of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as the manifestation of the illness ideology that has the greatest detrimental influence on clinical psychology. The chapter also proposes that the illness ideology be replaced with a positive psychology ideology that emphasizes well-being, life satisfaction, and what makes life worth living. Updates include discussions of the new DSM-5 and additional research on the problems with using diagnostic categories as a framework for understanding problems in living.
Sexual Difference
Authors: Crowther Kathleen
Published: September 2016

This essay that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans told many competing and conflicting stories about sexual differences and gender identities. These stories came from a wide range of sources, including the Bible, natural philosophical and medical texts, and travelers’ tales of exotic locales. Ideas about sexual difference were profoundly shaped by three interrelated historical developments: the religious upheavals of the Reformation; dramatic changes in medicine and science; and European exploration and colonization. The Protestant rejection of clerical celibacy led to new views of the differences between men and women and their respective roles in marriage and in society as a whole. Developments in science and medicine, specifically the recovery of ancient Greek medical texts, the rise of anatomical dissections, and the new importance of alchemy, as well as exploration and colonization of non-European lands and peoples, all shaped understandings of sexual differences.
Impure Resistance
Authors: Sanchez Melissa E.
Published: September 2016

This essay argues that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra demonstrate the inadequacy of ideals of pure, unambiguous resistance to dominant structures of normativity and power. Because tragedy as a genre stresses the limitations of individual agency and self-knowledge, it allows us to perceive the impure motives and conflicted identifications that render the relation between true and false consciousness, compulsion and choice, innocence and guilt, more complex than many feminist readings of the genre have allowed. In particular, Shakespeare’s love tragedies provide a space for exploring a more complex and variegated view of heteroerotic desire than models of compulsory heterosexuality or a uniform sex-gender system can provide. As these plays show, resistance to sexual norms and the sociopolitical hierarchies they help sustain may always be impure insofar as it is motivated by conflicting desires and quotidian interests as well as selfless ideals and ethical principles.
'Stray[ing] lower where the pleasant fountains lie'
Authors: Fisher Will
Published: September 2016

This article examines the passage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where Venus invites Adonis to perform cunnilingus on her, situating it in relation to other representations of this act from ballads, pornography, medical writing, and moralizing literature. Viewed together, these representations qualify two oft-repeated generalizations about oral sex in early modern English culture: (1) that the act was virtually unknown, and (2) that it was consistently viewed with disgust or disapprobation. By contrast, the texts assembled here demonstrate that cunnilingus was frequently portrayed as being quite pleasurable, and not only for the woman who received the gesture, but also for the individual who performed it. Moreover, these texts suggest that there may have been more cultural room for the acceptance of women’s sexuality—and of acts that were ‘serviceable to the ladies’—than has previously been acknowledged.
Time to Cheat
Authors: Bloom Gina
Published: September 2016

The Tempest’s chess game has often been interpreted as a symbol for Prospero’s successful governance, underscoring his likeness to King James I, who similarly relied on dynastic marriage to solve political conflicts. Approaching the chess game not as an abstract symbol but as an embodied practice complicates such conclusions, however. Chess calls upon players and spectators to hold in tension and inhabit simultaneously different temporal moments, producing a recursive experience of time that conflicts with the linear, teleological narratives articulated by Prospero and much conventional historicist criticism. This essay draws on descriptions of chess’s polytemporality—from game studies, cognitive science, and the political philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht—to explore how the phenomenology of chess-play mobilizes The Tempest’s spectators to critique the discourse of progress that subtends state rhetoric about dynastic marriage. Ultimately, this analysis also challenges commonplace critical assumptions about history as ‘context’ for dramatic performance.
Shakespeare Differently Disabled
Authors: Siebers Tobin
Published: September 2016

The standard locus of disability in Shakespeare has been Richard III, spanning from Freud’s seminal interpretation of Richard as a narcissist to readings in the emerging field of disability studies. Richard III represents the possibility for disability scholars to argue for the role that disability plays as a marker of villainy, one that obscures the humanity of disabled people, and they have made this case with precision and energy. It is crucial, however, to ask the price that disability scholars have paid by fitting Richard III so securely to their emerging discipline. If a certain disability studies chooses Richard III as its standard bearer, what would another disability studies look like that refuses him, and which Shakespearean character would be the standard bearer of this differently disabled disability studies?
Disability Figures in Shakespeare
Authors: Nardizzi Vin
Published: September 2016

Since at least Tony Sher’s star-making turn as Richard III in the early 1980s, a pair of crutches has come to signal in a supplemental way the king’s disability. Yet the play does not associate these devices with him; instead, his mother imagines her dead sons (Edward and Clarence) as ‘two crutches’ ‘plucked’ from her ‘feeble hands’ (2.2.58). I will explore the genealogical resonances of ‘crutches’ across Shakespeare’s drama to illuminate the discourses of impaired masculinity and reproductive futurity that have been eclipsed in critical accounts of early modern disability by the high profile afforded to the deformed body of this stage king.
Roguery and Reproduction in The Winter’s Tale
Authors: Friedlander Ari
Published: September 2016

Near the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, Leontes offers a well-known rationale for his suspicion of his wife Hermione’s infidelity: ‘From east, west, north, and south, be it concluded, / No barricado for a belly’ (1.2.204–5). This essay argues that Hermione’s prosecution for adultery and Perdita’s abandonment as a supposed bastard each evoke lower-class early modern legal institutions in which the community played a central role: the prosecution of sexual immorality by ecclesiastical courts, and the stigmatization of illegitimate reproduction encouraged by the poor laws. By applying these incongruous legal institutions to royalty, the play denaturalizes the supposed sexual purity of the nobility, representing it as part of the same social processes that produce sexual order in England’s church courts and local parishes.
Typographical Embodiment
Authors: Maguire Laurie
Published: September 2016

That typography is a form of embodiment is obvious. Like writing, it offers material markers for sounds. On the early modern stage, punctuation marks were given personality, either adjectivally—as when Marston’s Antonio tells his beloved, ‘we’ll point [punctuate] our speech / With amorous kissing, kissing commas’—or physically, as when a character is named Dash in Lording Barry’s Ram Alley (Q 1611). For us today, etcetera is an abbreviation indicating the continuation of properties in a list. But in the early modern period etcetera embodied a variety of things: acoustic, physiological, temporal, rhetorical, grammatical. Only one of its multiple uses survives today: the abbreviation. This essay explores the complex history of this creatively used abbreviation.
Dead Likenesses and Sex Machines
Authors: Waldron Jennifer
Published: September 2016

Media theorists have recently sought to challenge traditional conceptions of a ‘medium’ as a passive means for human ends, or an exterior supplement to an essential human core; however, they have not yet fully investigated the implications of this conceptual shift for the history of gender. This essay focuses on two key Shakespearean scenes in which female characters become tightly associated with the theatrical medium: the awakening of Queen Hermione’s statue in The Winter’s Tale and the bed-tricks of All’s Well That Ends Well. While these scenes link theatrical devices with qualities conventionally gendered feminine (artificiality, exteriority, and embodiment), they also transvalue the traditionally negative associations of that feminization, in part by reimagining the workings of mediation itself. Shakespeare’s plays thus offer nascent forms of media theory that are deeply relevant to our contemporary world.
Double Falsehood
Authors: Dugan Holly
Published: September 2016

In both its source material and in later adaptations, the Cardenio plot involves an attempted rape of a servant woman while cross-dressed as a shepherd by her employer, the Master of the Flock. In almost every instance, the Master of the Flock discovers that the shepherd is really a woman before attempting to rape her. In this essay, I focus in on this moment, querying why this might be so. Juxtaposing more recent adaptations of its source materials with Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood, I analyse how these two aspects of identity—‘woman’ and ‘shepherd’—influence the impact of the assault, particularly in terms of genre. Using the lost play-text as a way to theorize other absences in our histories of rape, I argue that Cardenio maps not only our cultural willingness to define some acts of violence as rape but also our willingness to ignore others.
Interrupting the Lucrece Effect?
Authors: Howard Jean E.
Published: September 2016

The early modern period inherited and recirculated striking stories of women whom we would now call victims of rape: Lucrece, Philomela, Virginia, to name but a few of the most prominent. These stories were repeated in poems, in plays, in tapestries and samplers, their classical origins enhancing their cultural authority. ‘Interrupting the Lucrece Effect: The Performance of Rape on the Early Modern Stage’ compares possibilities for feminist stagings of rape narratives in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Heywood’s The Tragedy of Lucrece. The essay argues that performance can variously cover over or critique the pernicious ideologies that permeate familiar early modern tales of rape and considers what a feminist performance practice hopes to achieve in staging rape stories and the different ways practitioners have used the resources of the theatre to achieve their goals.
Magic in the Chains
Authors: Henderson Diana E.
Published: September 2016

In analysing an important Hindi film’s precise yet radical reconception of Othello’s famously overdetermined handkerchief in the form of a jewelled chain or ‘kamarband’, this essay focuses on media representation and gender across time and space. It demonstrates how material objects factor into the perception and definition of gendered bodies in Shakespeare’s playtexts and modern performance, using ‘comparative close analysis’ to understanding the symbolic, narrative, and political consequentiality of metamorphic things. In Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2006 Omkara’s, chains of corrupted authority, both political and domestic, have superseded the superstitious magic in the web of Othello; following the kamarband’s journey reveals complexities in each artwork’s conception of femaleness, a sustained opposition between the sexes’ moral culpability, and an alternative form of female community. Omkara reframes difference and foregrounds gendered embodiment in a culturally specific, insightful way that prompts reflection upon our critical methods and futures in cross-cultural media and gender studies.
Digging for Indigenous Knowledge
Authors: Stump Daryl
Published: September 2016

Stratigraphic excavation is perhaps the defining technique of archaeological research, since it is this approach that provides the necessary contextual information for all other forms of archaeological sampling. Rightly perceived as intensive in terms of labour, time, and resources, excavation seems at odds with the aims of developmental interventions that are often under pressure to produce rapid and sustainable solutions to immediate and ongoing environmental and human crises. Drawing on research in eastern Africa, this chapter will argue that some questions of relevance to developmental and conservationist debates can nevertheless only be answered through detailed stratigraphic data, and that these data are essential in order to construct models of landscape change and to assess the sustainability and resilience of these landscapes.
Slow Dissolves, Full Stops, and Interruptions
Authors: Beckerman Michael
Published: September 2016

This study looks at several musical works written in Terezin in the summer of 1944 to explore the way censorship, or what is referred to as a “censoring environment,” affects a range of musical choices. Four composers, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Viktor Ullmann, and Hans Krasa use a range of suggestive allusions in their instrumental works in order to write pieces that seem to be creating a certain of kind of insistent expression. I argue that their efforts are part of an attempt to witness, or to communicate to those both inside and outside a range of secret meanings about the concentration camp experience, and even possibly engage in musical sabotage.
Popular Music as a Barometer of Political Change
Authors: Guy Nancy
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines popular music as a barometer of political change in democratizing Taiwan. After providing a brief overview of developments in Taiwan’s pop music world as they relate to political change, the essay details the innovative musical creations of the late 1980s through the 1990s that heralded the regime change of May 2000, when Chen Shui-bian was elected President, thus ending the Chinese Nationalist Party’s fifty years of unbroken rule. It also chronicles the banning in the People's Republic of China of certain Taiwan based performers, and demonstrates how some artists self-censure rather than risk losing access to mainland Chinese markets and media.
Imaging the Networks of Executive Functions
Authors: Holder Christen M. , Shay Nicole
Published: September 2016

This chapter examines the different theoretical conceptualizations of executive functions and how neuroimaging can reveal their neuroanatomical mechanisms. After briefly considering various definitions and descriptions of executive function, it discusses the results of lesion studies that look into specific executive functions; namely, attention, working memory, inhibition, decision-making, planning and organization, processing speed, and cognitive flexibility or shifting. It also evaluates measures that are used to capture the executive functions just cited, along with the advances that have been achieved with the help of neuroimaging studies. On the basis of neuroimaging evidence, the authors show that the right prefrontal cortex, as well as the parietal and temporal lobes, plays an important role in executive function.
Contact and Postcontact Iñupiat Ethnohistory
Authors: Sheehan Glenn W. , Jensen Anne M.
Published: September 2016

This chapter covers the contact and postcontact period of Iñupiat history in northern and northwestern Alaska, drawing on archaeological and ethnohistorical records. The period of interest saw gradually increasing interaction with Europeans—initially Russian, and eventually British and American. In terms of archaeology, though, the contact period, and in particular the nineteenth century, is under-represented. This chapter covers the radical changes impacting Iñupiat society in terms of settlement patterns, warfare, trade, architecture, social relations, mortuary practices and the history and effects of contact with Euro-Americans. Several areas that could benefit from additional research are highlighted, including continued research on early political and social organization, as well as projects aimed at understanding early non-Native sites in the region.
Maritime Economies of the Central Gulf of Alaska after 4000 .
Authors: Steffian Amy , Saltonstall Patrick , Yarborough Linda Finn
Published: September 2016

Alaska’s central gulf coast encompasses four environmentally diverse regions stretching from Prince William Sound to the Pacific coast of the Alaska Peninsula. Despite their unique geographic and biological settings, these regions have a distinct and cohesive cultural history. Here, the historic distribution of Alutiiq or Sugpiaq peoples reflects the distribution of prehistoric cultures, illustrating a broadly unified evolutionary trajectory. Archaeological data from the past 4,000 years suggest the development of prosperous, permanent villages from smaller, more fluid foraging communities through human ingenuity—the ability to harvest resources with increasing efficiency and to manage inevitable fluctuations in the availability of foods and raw materials in a productive but dynamic environment. Together, changes in climate, population growth, technological innovation, and interaction with other peoples shaped the central gulf’s ancient societies into the powerful corporate groups recorded historically.
Archaeology of the Eastern Aleut Region
Authors: Maschner Herbert
Published: September 2016

The prehistory of the eastern Aleut region is one of the most convoluted and dynamic cultural trajectories in the Arctic region. Situated on the one of the world’s most productive fisheries, it is on the hinge point between the often-violent North Pacific and Bering Sea climate regimes. The richest marinescapes in the Pacific region gave rise to the largest human populations, the largest villages, and the most socially complex organizations in the Eskimo-Aleut world. But these villages rose and fell, and even the largest were subject to periodic cultural collapse. Climate, marine productivity, and boating technology are the key factors in understanding the archaeology of this part of Alaska.
The Enigmatic Choris and Old Whaling Cultures of the Western Arctic
Authors: Darwent Christyann , Darwent John
Published: September 2016

The Choris (750–400 B.C.) and Old Whaling (1150–850 B.C.) cultures are both enigmatic manifestations in the archaeological record in a time of significant cultural “flux” in northwestern Alaskan prehistory. Both cultures represent potential first occurrences in the region—novel lithic assemblage and housing forms (implying the movement of new people into the region) and the possibility of whaling in the case of Old Whaling, and the introduction of pottery and new communal house structures for Choris. However, most of the solid evidence for Choris comes from primarily two locations—Choris Peninsula and Onion Portage, and thus far Old Whaling has only been identified at Cape Krusenstern. The chapter explores both of these archaeological cultures, their chronology and geographic distribution, associated artifacts, subsistence economy, and how they articulate with broader culture history of the western Arctic.
The Old Bering Sea Florescence about Bering Strait
Authors: Mason Owen
Published: September 2016

Dependent on whaling, a series of complex, sedentary societies termed Old Bering Sea arose around Bering Strait at proximity to resource hot spots, ca. 250 B.C. to A.D. 400, thrived between A.D. 600 and 800 and with influences as late as A.D. 1300. Old Bering Sea developed adjacent to walrus haul-outs and was associated with the most elaborate aesthetic system known in the Arctic. Virtually every artifact was overlain with formalized motifs, as figural representations were crafted, of both animals and humans. This breakthrough was due either to internal societal dynamics or, alternatively, was an artifact of taphonomic factors, such as fortuitous site preservation. The origins of the culture remain obscure, as does its fate; its technology is related to subsequent Punuk and Thule cultures.
Ancient DNA and Stable Isotopes
Authors: O'Rourke Dennis , Tackney Justin , Coltrain Joan , Raff Jennifer
Published: September 2016

Genetic diversity in modern Arctic communities provides a baseline from which to assess population history. This is augmented by documenting patterns of genetic variation in prehistoric populations using ancient DNA methods, and inferring dietary resource information and adaptive strategies derived from stable isotope analyses. This chapter uses this multidisciplinary approach to examine population history and colonization events in the Aleutians of South Alaska, and the origin and population history of Paleoeskimo and Neoeskimo populations of the North American Arctic. The power to identify past demographic events relies on knowledge of both genetic and isotopic signatures of demographic events, and on acquisition of securely dated and well provenienced samples for analysis.
Development of Mackenzie Inuit Culture
Authors: Arnold Charles
Published: September 2016

Prior to the appearance of Euroamericans and the cultural disruptions that followed in their wake, the western regions of the Canadian Arctic were occupied by Inuit groups who had strong affinities to specific home territories. Although each group had its own name, outside observers have applied the term “Mackenzie Inuit” to them collectively on the basis of shared cultural traits and their proximity to the Mackenzie River, whose resources first attracted them. Information from archaeology, historical records, and local oral histories is drawn upon to formulate an interpretive framework for the origins and development of Mackenzie Inuit over a period spanning 500 to 600 years.
Independence I and Saqqaq
Authors: Grønnow Bjarne
Published: September 2016

The first hunting societies migrated via High Arctic Canada into Greenland around 4,500 years ago. Known archaeologically as Independence I and Saqqaq, they settled the entire island within a remarkably short time span: Independence in the High Arctic (Thule area, Peary Land, and northeast Greenland) and Saqqaq in the other coastal areas of the island. Two permanently frozen Saqqaq sites in Disko Bugt, west Greenland, with excellent preservation conditions for organic artifacts, have yielded unique insight into the material culture, subsistence economy, daily life, and settlement patterns of these Paleoeskimo pioneers. After a few centuries, High Arctic Greenland was abandoned, and the Saqqaq seemingly became isolated from other societies in the Eastern Arctic. Nevertheless, Saqqaq thrived at least on the central west coast until 2,800 years ago, thus representing the hitherto longest-lasting continuous settlement period in Greenland.