Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century
- Submitting institution
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University of Oxford
- Unit of assessment
- 29 - Classics
- Output identifier
- 1308
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.1093/oso/9780198804215.001.0001
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- ISBN
- 9780198804215
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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3
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This is the first systematic study of the history of modern theatre's long-standing relationship with the Greco-Roman epics. With specialists from multiple scholarly disciplines and from the creative industries, this edited volume charts the afterlife of epic in modern performance traditions across time and place, from generic, formal, geopolitical and socio-political perspectives. The anxieties about the ability to write epic poetry in the early modern world, together with the precedent of Greek tragedy's reworking of epic material, in many ways explain epic's migration to the theatre. Yet equally, with this migration, epic encountered the barriers imposed by neoclassicists, who sought to restrict serious theatre to a narrowly defined reality that precluded epic's broad sweeps across time and place. In recent years, however, the recognition that the Homeric epics were composed orally makes reinvention in multiple performance spaces not only legitimate for many artists but also deeply appropriate.
Macintosh is the lead editor of this volume: she designed the structure, did the first full edit of all the chapters and is the author of two chapters. Her Introduction explores what identifying 'epic' in performance entails, uses Brecht's avowedly anti-Aristotelian 'Epic Theatre' as both foil and guide, and concludes that certain recurrent formal elements in epic performances suggest greater affinity with Brecht's 'Epic Theatre' than might have initially been imagined. Her chapter 'Epic Transposed: the Real and the Hyperreal during the Revolutionary Period in France' traces the vexed theoretical problem of epic in the eighteenth century: banished from tragedy, it could either be 'low' (so confined to the comic/popular stages) or transported to the hyperreality of the opera/ballet, where, chillingly and paradoxically, it provided a bitter reflection of the revolutionary actualities unfolding outside the theatre.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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