No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

My dissertation examines how early modern metatheater enabled the Renaissance stage and its original audience to develop a complex and symbiotic relationship. Metatheater--by which I mean a particular mode of theatre, in which actors, playwrights, dramatic characters and/or (in particular) audiences express or share a perception of drama as a fictional and theatrical construct--pervaded Renaissance drama, not by simple happenstance but arising almost inevitably from the complex context within which it functioned. The early modern stage was a particularly conflicted forum, which monarchs and playwrights, town fathers and actors, censors and audiences, impresarios and anti-theatricalists, all strove to influence and control. The use of the metatheatrical mode allowed playwrights and players to better navigate this difficult, sometimes dangerous, space. In particular, the development of Renaissance metatheater derived from (and, simultaneously, affected) the unique nature of its original spectators, who practiced a much more actively engaged participation in the theater than is often recognized. Performers and playwrights regularly used metatheatricality to adapt to the needs and desires of their audience, and to elicit the intellectual and emotional responses they desired. My study utilizes a historically contextualized approach that emphasizes the material conditions under which Renaissance drama arose and functioned. It begins by examining the influence of the surrounding milieu on the Renaissance stage and its spectators, especially its facilitation of the development and use of metatheater. Then, via close readings of four plays--Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare's Henry V and Antony and Cleopatra, and Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle--the dissertation indicates how varied and versatile early modern metatheater was, and how it responded to and influenced the nature of its audiences. My study demonstrates the centrality of metatheater to early modern theatrical practice, delineates its pervasive influence on the stage-audience relationship in Renaissance theaters, and underlines the influence of material conditions on the creation and dissemination of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. / English

This dissertation examines representations of Native peoples during the British Imperial Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates specifically on diplomatic Go-Between figures, individuals who performed a mediating role between their own indigenous communities and the colonizers. The dissertation examines images and objects within a postcolonial framework, engaging notions of hybridity and mimicry in order to interrogate more traditional readings of colonial power and representation. The images of Native peoples that appeared in ethnographic studies, paintings, and prints, as well as in objects of material culture such as games, books, and toys, reveal a dislocating indigenous agency within their colonial contexts. By offering new considerations of artistic process and the role of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatrical culture, the dissertation suggests that these Native figures were mediated by the tropes and conventions of contemporary theater through pose, gesture, and other dramaturgical allusions. In its exploration of the theatrical dimensions of imperial diplomacy and Go-Between representation, including evidence of performative mimicry by Go-Betweens themselves, my dissertation reveals an even more subtle interplay of identities in the context of colonial image-making than art historians have hitherto recognized. In addition to using theater history and performance theory to situate Go-Between images in relation to the contemporary English stage, the study also implicates the creative process and resulting artifacts themselves in the Go-Between status, affording the material object itself a hybridity that can become the site of ideological dislocation. / Art History

The thesis will be divided into the following parts: the introduction will focus on the objectives of the research, review of literature, and the blueprint of methodology. Chapter One will define some basic concepts and introduce the historical background. Chapter Two will explore the relationship between modern city and the Avant-garde drama in terms of "modern city", thus leading to four relevant parts: new ways to understand space and time, cultural transformation, global spectacle and new media. Chapter Three will turn to the definition of the Avant-garde drama, discussing the relationship between the specific areas of drama (drama practitioners, motives of the drama, stage scenery, spectatorship, and body) and the modern city. Chapter Four will analyze in details the cases in two metropolis: Beijing and Shanghai, particularly comparing their cultural background, production situation, the type and quality of the production and the spectator groups. The variation of the urban culture influences the production choices of the Avant-garde drama; while the Avant-garde drama reflects the cultural transformation of different cities. In addition, this chapter will briefly analyze the drama as a carrier of cultural interaction of cities, and I will conduct a comparative study in this interchange and interaction. The results of the above research will be concluded in the final chapter. / The thesis will discourse on the context of contemporary mainland China, and analyze the inner tensions lying in a complex matrix of contending relationships between the modern city and the Avant-garde drama. I will try to explore the characteristics, situation, evolution and future possibilities of the dramas in the context of modern urban society, while probing into the situation and symptoms of modern Chinese cities in relation to the Avant-garde drama. I will find out the construction of the power relationships concomitant with the cultural transformation in mainland China from 1990s, and will explore the possibility of the Avant-garde theatre as a public space as well as the modern city's stimulation and facilitation of this possibility. / 李婭菲. / Advisers: Thomas Luk; Natalia Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: 1840. / Thesis (doctoral)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 214-230). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Li Yafei.