Hilton Edwards, Brecht and the Brechtian

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-98
Author(s):  
Joan FitzPatrick Dean
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
The Political ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
Irish Theatre ◽  
Design Elements ◽  
Half Century ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Irish Politics

The Dublin Gate Theatre Company’s repertory of international, often experimental plays offers perhaps the clearest distinction between the Gate and the Abbey in the mid-twentieth century. A growing body of scholarship focuses on how Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir deployed innovative, non-realistic staging techniques and brought to Ireland design elements associated with European artists. The Gate’s international remit can also be seen in its production of plays not merely authored by foreign playwrights, but focused on issues outside the conventional purview of Irish politics, including anti-Semitism and totalitarianism. Throughout his career, Hilton Edwards often sought out non-realistic dramaturgies to critique modern institutions. Some of the plays chosen by Edwards and mac Liammóir were so provocative, socially-conscious, and politically-charged that they challenged the prevailing ethos in Catholic Ireland and incurred the wrath of the Catholic Cinema and Theatre Patrons’ Association. Edwards’ exposure to Bertolt Brecht’s plays, theories, and the 1956 London performances by the Berliner Ensemble prompted not only his production of Mother Courage in 1959 and Saint Joan of the Stockyards two years later, but also his greater willingness to comment on theatre, for example on the radio and in his book The Mantle of Harlequin (1958). Edwards shared with Brecht an awareness of music as integral to performance and a vision of theatre unconstrained by realism and the proscenium arch. Although the Gate repertory of new productions in the post-Emergency era may appear unsurprising, that perspective is informed by the half century in which dramatists such as Arthur Miller and Brecht emerged canonical figures. Hilton Edwards’ direction of Mother Courage and Saint Joan of the Stockyards advanced the Gate’s internationalism and helped to reshape the political nature of Irish theatre. Keywords: Hilton Edwards, Dublin Gate Theatre, Bertolt Brecht, Irish theatre, theatre and politics, Brechtian

Lev Gumilev: His Pretensions as Founder of Ethnology and his Eurasian Theories

Inner Asia ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergei Panarin ◽  
Viktor Shnirelman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Scientific Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Biological Entity ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Special Time

AbstractThis paper takes a critical look at the work of the extraordinarily popular historian Lev Gumilev. Writing in late Soviet times, Gumilev has become virtually a cult figure in Russia after his death. He took up the ideas of the Eurasianists of the early twentieth century, according to whom Russia's destiny is to be a Eurasian power, and he reconfigured them as a ‘scientific’ theory of ethnos. The ethnos is supposed to be a ‘biological’ entity determined by its place in the natural environment, but at the same time, inspired by a few innovative leaders, each ‘ethnos’ has its special time of intense flowering (which Gumilev called ‘passionary’). The article examines the contradictions in Gumilev's theories and its methodological flaws. It endswith a discussion of the political implications ofGumilev's popularity in post-Socialist Russia. He is not only admired by semi-educated people but is also legitimised by sections of the academy (a university is named after him in Kazakhstan). It is argued that his work lends a spurious credence to nationalismand anti-semitism.

G. K. Chesterton and Islam

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Tom Villis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Context ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Scholarly Attention

G. K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism has attracted much scholarly attention, but his views on Islam have largely passed without comment. This article situates Chesterton's writings in relation to historical views of Islam in Britain and the political, cultural and religious context of the early twentieth century. Chesterton's complex and contradictory opinions fail to support easy conclusions about the immutability of prejudice across time. His views of Islam are at times orientalist and at other times critical of imperialism and elitism. As well as drawing on medieval Catholic ideas about the “heresy” of Islam, Chesterton also links Islam with Protestant Christianity. From another perspective, his views of Islam draw on liberal traditions of humanitarian interventionism and democratic patriotism. Finally, he also used Islam as a symbol of a corroding modernity. This study suggests the need for a historically sensitive genealogy of the evolution of anti-Muslim prejudice which is not predetermined by the politics of the early twenty-first century.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

Female Representation in Colombia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mónica Pachón ◽  
Santiago E. Lacouture
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Female Representation ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Substantive Representation ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Electoral Democracy ◽  
Almost All

Mónica Pachón and Santiago E. Lacouture examine the case of Colombia and show that women’s representation has been low and remains low in most arenas of representation and across national and subnational levels of government. The authors identify institutions and the highly personalized Colombian political context as the primary reasons for this. Despite the fact that Colombia was an electoral democracy through almost all of the twentieth century, it was one of the last countries in the region to grant women political rights. Still, even given women’s small numbers, they do bring women’s issues to the political arena. Pachón and Lacoutre show that women are more likely to sponsor bills on women-focused topics, which may ultimately lead to greater substantive representation of women in Colombia.

Towards the Final Legitimation of the Party

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Sole Source ◽  
The Political ◽  
Party Formation ◽  
Post War ◽  
Dominant Influence

Chapter 3 investigates the process of party formation in France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy, and demonstrates the important role of cultural and societal premises for the development of political parties in the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid in this context to the conditions in which the two mass parties, socialists and Christian democrats, were established. A larger set of Western European countries included in this analysis is thoroughly scrutinized. Despite discontent among traditional liberal-conservative elites, full endorsement of the political party was achieved at the beginning of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of the interwar totalitarian party, especially under the guise of Italian and German fascism, when ‘the party’ attained its most dominant influence as the sole source and locus of power. The chapter concludes by suggesting hidden and unaccounted heritages of that experience in post-war politics.

Realignment and Beyond

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Societal Changes

Affluent democracies have experienced tremendous socio-economic changes since the mid- twentieth century, which has reshaped public opinion, party programs, and electoral choices. This chapter first summarizes the societal changes that have been a driving force behind the political changes described in this study. One pattern involves the longstanding economic issues of contemporary democracies, and shifting social positions on these issues. In addition, an evolving cultural cleavage and its ties to broader attitudes toward social change have altered citizen policy preferences. In most affluent democracies, the parties’ responses to these changing citizen demands have produced a realignment to represent both economic and cultural positions. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for the working of electoral systems and the democratic process more broadly.

The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 505-526
Author(s):  
Eileen J. Herrmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Tennessee Williams ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
American Drama ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
David Mamet ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
Rachel Crothers ◽  
Susan Glaspell

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

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