Content area
Full Text
THEATER HISTORIOGRAPHY: CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS. Edited by Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010; pp. x + 302.
While Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie's edited volume Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (1989) is still cited as a landmark study in theatre historiography, the past few years have seen a number of important additions to the field, such as Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) and Charlotte Canning and Postlewait's Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2010; reviewed above). By and large, these texts address defining issues facing contemporary theatre historians, such as the changing nature of the archive and its effect on the interpretation of historical evidence. In Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, editors Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen have compiled twenty-one essays from a diverse group of theatre scholars to introduce students to the field of theatre historiography, while presenting many of these same pressing issues "with an eye toward use in the classroom" (8).
The book is divided into five sections, each of which focuses on a specific topic in theatre historiography: the question of evidence; the political stakes of history; the shifting paradigms of theatre history; history as performance; and disciplinarity. Each section is composed of four or five brief essays, averaging around ten pages. Since the brevity of these essays limits the scope of inquiry within each piece, the entire work reads as a series of very precise investigations into specific topics, providing a cursory tour of the field of contemporary theatre historiography.
The first of these sections,...