Theatre and Ghosts Materiality, Performance and Modernity

by Luckhurst, Mary; Morin, Emilie

• ISBN13: 9781137345066
• ISBN10: 1137345063
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-07-25
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. The contributors include internationally-renowned theatre scholars who have shaped the study of cultural memory. Essays shed new light on spectral economies, geo-politics, and histories of acting; they span from adaptations of the Gothic to the operations and technologies of the modern and new supernatural, addressing topics such as ghost-seeing, horror shows, mediums, revenants, haunted sites, spiritual worlds, and acting as an incarnation of the dead.

Author Biography

Mary Luckhurst is Professor of Artistic Research and Creative Practice at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She co-founded the new Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York, UK, and is a pioneer in practice as research. She is a playwright, director and an authority on articulating the processes and practices of writing, acting and directing for theatre. She is the author and editor of many books including Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre, Theatre and Celebrity, 1660-2000, On Acting, On Directing, Playimg for Real and Caryl Churchill. The Higher Education Academy awarded her a National Teaching Fellowship and made her an International Scholar in 2013 in recognition of her outstanding international contribution to teaching and research in drama and performance.

Emilie Morin is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary British and Irish literature, theatre history, and European modernism. Her monograph Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality; Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin
PART I: GHOSTS, STAGE ADAPTATION AND TECHNOLOGY
1.'Charles Dickens and the Invention of the Modern Stage Ghost'; Marvin Carlson
2.'Gothic Adaptation and the Stage Ghost'; Nathalie Wolfram
PART II: SPECTRAL ECONOMIES
3.'Apprehending the Spectral: Hauntology and Precarity in Caryl Churchill's Plays'; Rachel Clements
4.'Heritage, Capital and Culture: The Ghost of 'Sarah' at the Bristol Old Vic'; Catherine Hindson
5.'Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?: American Ghost Shows of the Twentieth Century'; Beth A. Kattelman
PART III: MODERNITY, GENDER AND GHOST AESTHETICS
6.'Masculinity, Haunting and Twentieth-Century American Realism'; Paul D. Streufert
7. ''Pretty Ghost, a Duet': On Dying While You Still Look Good'; Joseph Roach
PART IV: ACTING, ABSENCE AND REMATERIALIZATION
8.'A Restoration Vanishing Act: The Case of Thomas Betterton's Groin'; Michael Cordner
9.'Giving Up the Ghost: The Actor's Body as Haunted House'; Mary Luckhurst
10.'Michael Chekhov: The Spiritual Realm and the Invisible Body'; Tom Cornford
11.'Haunting Shakespeare, or King Lear Meets Alice'; Peter Holland
Select Bibliography
Index