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Concentrating on Europe, this volume's sixteen essays discuss different forms of medievalism in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Serbia. Medievalism, the whole spectrum of post-medieval response to the middle ages, is now accepted as a vital key to the understanding of Western culture and society from 1500 to the present, pervading every aspect of our time, from the popular and artistic to the scholarly. Studies in Medievalism, now published annually, is the one series to provide a regular forum for discussion of medievalism. This volume is devoted to medievalism in Europe, excludingEngland (the subject of Volume IV,1992). Contributors from Europe and America consider medievalism in Germany, Italy, France, Spain and Serbia over a wide range of topics from eighteenth-century French politics and nineteenth-century German nationalism to contemporary Italian film.
What were the origins of commedia dell'arte and how did it evolve as a dramatic form over time and as it spread from Italy? How did its relationship to the ruling ideology of the day change during the Enlightenment? What is its legacy today? These are just some of the questions addressed in this authoritative overview of the dramatic, ideological and aesthetic form of commedia dell'arte. The book's 3 sections examine the changing role of performers and playwrights, improvisatory scenarios and scripted performance, and its function as a vehicle for social criticism, to offer readers a clear understanding of commedia dell'arte's evolution in Renaissance Italy and beyond. This study throws new light on the role of women performers; on the changing ideological discourse of commedia dell'arte, which included social reform and, later, conservatism as well as the alienation of ethnic minorities in complicity with its audience; and on its later adaptation into hybrid forms including grotesque dance and the giullarata typified by the work of Dario Fo.
This volume, Futurism and the Technological Imagination, results from a conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas in Helsinki. It contains a number of re-written conference contributions as well as several specially commissioned essays that address various aspects of the Futurists’ relationship to technology both on an ideological level and with regard to their artistic languages. In the early twentieth century, many art movements vied with each other to overhaul the aesthetic and ideological foundations of arts and literature and to make them suitable vehicles of expression in the new Era of the Machine. Some of the most remarkable examples came from the Futurist movement, founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. By addressing the full spectrum of Futurist attitudes to science and the machine world, this collection of 14 essays offers a multifaceted account of the complex and often contradictory features of the Futurist technological imagination. The volume will appeal to anybody interested in the history of modern culture, art and literature.
'When Men Dance' explores the intersection of dance and perceptions of male gender and sexuality across history and different cultural contexts. Its scholarly essays tackle the history and dilemmas that revolve around dance and notions of masculinity from a variety of dance studies perspectives.
Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing p...
Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing p...
Pagodas in Play analyzes the treatment of China in the imaginative and spectacular world of eighteenth-century Italian opera. It shows how Italians used perceptions of Chinese culture to address local and transnational developments, particularly Enlightenment and secular reform initiatives. Its focus on the texts and performance practices of opera, an entertainment form accessible to a wide public, reveals cultural operations and identities harder to detect in non-fictional reformist writings, the texts traditionally privileged to explain Italian mediations of Enlightenment ideas. In its close reading of nine libretti of the most salient Settecento operas treating China (opere serie and oper...
Set the Stage! is a collection of essays on teaching Italian language, literature, and culture through theater. From theoretical background to course models, this book provides all the resources that teachers and students need to incorporate the rich and abundant Italian theater tradition into the curriculum. Features of the book includethe “Director's Handbook,” a comprehensive guide with detailed instructions for every step of the process, from choosing a text to the final performance,an exclusive interview with Nobel laureate Dario Fo,a foreword by prize-winning author Dacia Maraini.
Scholars, composers and performers write about the art of jazz improvisation.
This book is a result of the growing number of insights found in recent research on gesture studies and language acquisition, which have renewed the attention of scholars in gesture functions and meanings in communication and language learning. Observation of the participation of both gesture and speech in the formulation of meaning has revealed that communication is typically multimodal. This perspective has produced engrossing research questions, particularly in contexts where the combination of languages and cultures is complex and diversified. Competence in multiple languages and in different semiotic systems inevitably impacts the way in which people interact and learn languages. Given ...