Theatre Histories I: Origins Research Guide
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Underwood & Underwood, Copyright Claimant. Group of girls in Greek dance. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/2012646312/.
This guide is designed to help you with your research in THEA214: Theatre Histories I: Origins.
eBooks at Grafton Library
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The Anthropology of Performance
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The Anthropology of Performance is an invaluable guide to this exciting and growing area. This cutting-edge volume on the major advancements in performance studies presents the theories, methods, and practices of performance in cultures around the globe. Leading anthropologists describe the range of human expression through performance and explore its role in constructing identity and community, as well as broader processes such as globalization and transnationalism. Introduces new and advanced students to the task of studying and interpreting complex social, cultural, and political events from a performance perspective Presents performance as a convergent field of inquiry that bridges the humanities and social sciences, with a distinctive cross-cultural perspective in anthropology Demonstrates the range of human expression and meaning through performance in related fields of religious & ritual studies, folkloristics, theatre, language arts, and art & dance Explores the role of performance in constructing identity, community, and the broader processes of globalization and transnationalism Includes fascinating global case studies on a diverse range of phenomena Contributions from leading scholars examine verbal genres, ritual and drama, public spectacle, tourism, and the performances embedded in everyday selves, communities and nations
ISBN: 9781118493090Publication Date: 2013-01-17 -
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Developing Theatre in the Global South
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A reexamination of the historiography of theater in the decolonizing world after World War II. This collection presents innovative institutional approaches to the theatre historiography of the Global South, proposing a fundamental reexamination of the historiography of theater in emerging countries since 1945. Covering perspectives from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, the chapters explore how US philanthropy, international organizations, and pan-African festivals all contributed to the globalization and institutionalization of the performing arts in the Global South. During the Cultural Cold War, the Global North intervened in and promoted forms of cultural infrastructure that were deemed adaptable to any environment. This form of politics impacted the construction of national theaters, the introduction of new pedagogical tools, and the invention of the workshop as a format. The networks of experts responsible for this foreground seminal figures, both celebrated (Augusto Boal, Efua Sutherland) but also lesser-known (Albert Botbol, Severino Montano, Metin And), who contributed to the worldwide theatrical epistemic community of the postwar years. Developing Theatre in the Global South investigates the institutional factors that led to the emergence of professional theatre in the postwar period throughout the decolonizing world. The book's institutional and transnational approach enables theatre studies to overcome its commonly strong national and local focus on plays and productions and to connect it to current discourses in transnational and global history.
ISBN: 9781800085756Publication Date: 2024-11-05
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Art and Religion in Africa
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Africa's religious and artistic traditions constitute a primary example of its intellectual and cultural vitality. Artistic works play a vital role - especially where oral traditions dominate - in communicating ideas about the relationship between the human, spiritual and natural worlds. This work is a comparative study of Africa's visual and performing arts, concentrating on their geographical, material and gendered diversity, and focusing on the relation of these arts to African religion. The author combines ethnographic and art-historical methodology but does not assume any prior knowledge of African art or African religion. The text seeks a greater understanding of the philosophical and religious aspects of African art, thus challenging western perceptions of what is "important" in terms of artistic representation. This approach reveals the transformative capacities and multi-dimensionality of African art. The work also highlights the changes brought about by Christianity, Islam and the newer religious movements in post-colonial Africa.
ISBN: 9780826436559Publication Date: 1998-10-01 -
Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic
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Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic world where African?descended communities have expressed their values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce, commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism, emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing, and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human condition.
ISBN: 9780253013866Publication Date: 2014-10-03 -
Yoruba Ritual
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Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.
ISBN: 0253318173Publication Date: 1992-03-01 -
Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance
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Using storytelling and performance to explore shared religious expression across continents Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge, Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared ritual traditions between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the island in the transatlantic slave trade. The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities: Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with insights gained from sensorial experience. Including reflections on the making of an art installation based on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists and artists with relevance to any discipline. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
ISBN: 9781683402404Publication Date: 2021-05-18 -
The Performance Arts in Africa
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The Performance Arts in Africa is the first anthology of key writings on African performance from many parts of the continent. As well as play texts, off the cuff comedy routines and masquerades, this exciting collection encompasses community-based drama, tourist presentations, television soap operas, puppet theatre, dance, song, and ceremonial ritualised performances. Themes discussed are: * theory * performers and performing * voice, language and words * spectators, space and time. The book also includes an introduction which examines some of the crucial debates, past and present, surrounding African performance. The Performance Arts of Africa is an essential introduction for those new to the field and is an invaluable reference source for those already familiar with African performance.
ISBN: 9781136416897Publication Date: 2013-12-16 -
Black Theatre
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Generating a new understanding of the past--as well as a vision for the future--this path-breaking volume contains essays written by playwrights, scholars, and critics that analyze African American theatre as it is practiced today.Even as they acknowledge that Black experience is not monolithic, these contributors argue provocatively and persuasively for a Black consciousness that creates a culturally specific theatre. This theatre, rooted in an African mythos, offers ritual rather than realism; it transcends the specifics of social relations, reaching toward revelation. The ritual performance that is intrinsic to Black theatre renews the community; in Paul Carter Harrison's words, it "reveals the Form of Things Unknown" in a way that "binds, cleanses, and heals."
ISBN: 9781439901151Publication Date: 2002-11-06
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Indigenous Religion and Cultural Performance in the New Maya World
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Based on more than thirty years of ethnographic fieldwork in Highland Guatemala, this study of Maya diviners, shamans, ritual dancers, and religious brotherhoods describes the radical changes in traditional Maya religious practice wrought by economic globalization and political turmoil. Focusing on the primary participants in the annual festival in the K'iche' Maya village of Santiago Momostenango, the authors show how older religious traditionalists and the new generation of "cultural activist" religious practitioners interact within a single local community, and how their competing agendas for adapting Maya religiosity to a new and continually changing political economy are perpetuating and changing Maya religious traditions.
ISBN: 9780826353191Publication Date: 2013-07-01 -
Prehistoric Games of North American Indians
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Prehistoric Games of North American Indians is a collection of studies on the ancient games of indigenous peoples of North America. The authors, all archaeologists, muster evidence from artifacts, archaeological features, ethnography, ethnohistory, and to a lesser extent linguistics and folklore. Chapters sometimes center on a particular game (chunkey rolling disc game or patolli dice game, for example) or sometimes on a specific prehistoric society and its games (Aztec acrobatic games, games of the ancient Fremont people), and in one instance on the relationship between slavery and gaming in ancient indigenous North American societies. In addition to the intrinsic value of pursuing the time depth of these games, some of which remain popular and culturally important today among Native Americans or within the broader society, the book is important for demonstrating a wide variety of research methods and for problematizing a heretofore overlooked research topic. Issues that emerge include the apparently ubiquitous but difficult to detect presence of gambling, the entanglement of indigenous games and the social logic of the societies in which they are embedded, the characteristics of women's versus men's games or those of in-group and out-group gaming, and the close correspondence between gaming and religion. The book's coverage is broad and balanced in terms of geography, level of socio-cultural organization and gender.
ISBN: 9781607815600Publication Date: 2017-06-30 -
American Indian Culture
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Every essay in this set addresses a cultural phenomenon characteristic of the indigenous peoples of North America. The entries cover the range of culture from lifeways, religious rituals, and material culture to art forms and modern social phenomena. Twenty separate essays cover both "Architecture" and "Arts and Crafts" in the ten North American culture areas: the Arctic, California, the Great Basin, the Northeast, the Northwest Coast, the Plains, the Plateau, the Southeast, the Southwest, and the Subarctic. In other entries, students will find everything from brief discussions of the importance of acorns or wild rice to a survey of agriculture; from a history of the atlatl to an essay on weapons in general; from entries on major dance forms to overviews of religions. Although the emphasis is on the traditional cultural heritage of North American indigenous peoples, modern social trends are surveyed and analyzed as well.
ISBN: 9781587653155Publication Date: 2004-01-01 -
Powwow
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This anthology examines the origins, meanings, and enduring power of the powwow. Held on and off reservations, in rural and urban settings, powwows are an important vehicle for Native peoples to gather regularly. Although sometimes a paradoxical combination of both tribal and intertribal identities, they are a medium by which many groups maintain important practices. nbsp; Powwow begins with an exploration of the history and significance of powwows, ranging from the Hochunk dances of the early twentieth century to present-day Southern Cheyenne gatherings to the contemporary powwow circuit of the northern plains. Contributors discuss the powwow’s performative and cultural dimensions, including emcees, song and dance, the expression of traditional values, and the Powwow Princess. The final section examines how powwow practices have been appropriated and transformed by Natives and non-Natives during the past few decades. Of special note is the use of powwows by Native communities in the eastern United States, by Germans, by gay and lesbian Natives, and by New Agers.
ISBN: 9780803252516Publication Date: 2005-12-01 -
Enduring Motives
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Enduring Motives examines tradition and religious beliefs as they are expressed in landscape, the built environment, visual symbols, stories, and ritual. Bringing together archaeologists and Native American experts, this volume focuses on long-lived religious traditions of the native peoples of the Americas and how religion codifies, justifies, and reinforces these traditions by placing a high value on continuity of beliefs and practice. Using clues from the archaeological record to piece together the oldest religions of the Americas, Enduring Motives is organized into four parts. Part 1 creates continuity through structure, iconography, and sacred stories that correspond to culture-specific symbolic representations of the universe. Part 2 explores the encoding of tradition in place and object, or how people use objects to enliven tradition and pass it on to future generations. Part 3 examines stability and change and shows how traditions can evolve over time without losing their core cultural significance. The final part recognizes deep-time traditions through the evidence of ancient cosmology and religious tradition. Spanning cultures as diverse as the Aztec, Plains Indians, Hopi, Mississippian, and Southwest Pueblo, Enduring Motives brings to light new insights on ancient religious beliefs, practices, methods, and techniques, which allow otherwise intangible facets of culture to be productively explored. Contributors Wesley Bernardini / James S. Brown Jr. / Cheryl Claassen / John E. Clark / ArleneColman / Warren DeBoer / Robert L. Hall /Kelley Hays-Gilpin / Alice Beck Kehoe /John E. Kelly / Stephen H. Lekson / ColinMcEwan / John Norder / Jeffrey Quilter /Amy Roe / Peter G. Roe / Linea Sundstrom
ISBN: 9780817386214Publication Date: 2012-10-24 -
The Aztecs
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The Aztecs brings to life one of the best-known indigenous civilizations of the Americas in a vivid, comprehensive account of the ancient Aztecs. A thorough examination of Aztec origins and civilization including religion, science, and thought Incorporates the latest archaeological excavations and research into explanations of the Spanish conquest and the continuity of Aztec culture in Central Mexico Expanded coverage includes key topics such as writing, music, royal tombs, and Aztec predictions of the end of the world
ISBN: 9781118257197Publication Date: 2013-03-01 -
Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief
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Archaeological case studies consider material evidence of religion and ritual in the pre-Columbian Eastern Woodlands Archaeologists today are interpreting Native American religion and ritual in the distant past in more sophisticated ways, considering new understandings of the ways that Native Americans themselves experienced them. Shaman, Priest, Practice, Belief: Materials of Ritual and Religion in Eastern North America broadly considers Native American religion and ritual in eastern North America and focuses on practices that altered and used a vast array of material items as well as how physical spaces were shaped by religious practices. Unbound to a single theoretical perspective of religion, contributors approach ritual and religion in diverse ways. Importantly, they focus on how people in the past practiced religion by altering and using a vast array of material items, from smoking pipes, ceremonial vessels, carved figurines, and iconographic images, to sacred bundles, hallucinogenic plants, revered animals, and ritual architecture. Contributors also show how physical spaces were shaped by religious practice, and how rock art, monuments, soils and special substances, and even land- and cityscapes were part of the active material worlds of religious agents. Case studies, arranged chronologically, cover time periods ranging from the Paleoindian period (13,000-7900 BC) to the late Mississippian and into the protohistoric/contact periods. The geographical scope is much of the greater southeastern and southern Midwestern culture areas of the Eastern Woodlands, from the Central and Lower Mississippi River Valleys to the Ohio Hopewell region, and from the greater Ohio River Valley down through the Deep South and across to the Carolinas. Contributors Sarah E. Baires / Melissa R. Baltus / Casey R. Barrier / James F. Bates / Sierra M. Bow / James A. Brown / Stephen B. Carmody / Meagan E. Dennison / Aaron Deter-Wolf / David H. Dye / Bretton T. Giles / Cameron Gokee / Kandace D. Hollenbach / Thomas A. Jennings / Megan C. Kassabaum / John E. Kelly / Ashley A. Peles / Tanya M. Peres / Charlotte D. Pevny / Connie M. Randall / Jan F. Simek / Ashley M. Smallwood / Renee B. Walker / Alice P. Wright
ISBN: 9780817392727Publication Date: 2019-12-31 -
Encyclopedia of North American Indians
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Even as interest in the powerful, often tragic history of Native America grows, many books continue to perpetuate long-standing misconceptions of the past as well as the romantic steretypes often popularized today. Readers can now rely on Encyclopedia of North American Indians for an authentic and often surprising portrait of the complexities of the Native American experience. Written by more than 260 contemporary authorities, the volume features many Native American contributors - including eminent writers, tribal elders, scholars, and activists - with voices as distinct as their subjects, offering a deeper and more informed appreciation of American Indian life, past and present. Illustrated with many rare photographs, the Encyclopedia features articles on subjects such as mound builders, reservations, cigar-store Indians, child rearing, powwows, boarding schools, museums and collectors, dreams, the occupation of Alcatraz, and the impact of American Indian civilizations on Europe and the world. Contemporary topics include gambling, sports mascots, alcoholism, urban Indians, and the status of women. Biographies illuminate not only famous chiefs and warriors but an enormously diverse group of historical figures, such as Pauline Johnson, a Mohawk who becme the first American Indian woman to publish poetry; Charles Curtis, a Kaw Indian who served as vice president under Herbert Hoover; and "Chief" Bender, an Ojibwa who played and coached professional baseball and
ISBN: 9780585077642Publication Date: 1996-01-01 -
The Sacred Hoop
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This pioneering work, first published in 1986, documents the continuing vitality of American Indian traditions and the crucial role of women in those traditions.
ISBN: 0807046175Publication Date: 1992-09-01
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Founding territorial cults in early Japan : traces of a forgotten ritual in ancient myths and legends
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ISBN: 9789004686458Publication Date: 2024 -
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Theatre and Society: Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama
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ISBN: 9781322990484Publication Date: 2015-01-01
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The evolution of opera theatre in the Middle East and North Africa
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This book is the first structured and complete research work undertaken on opera theatres across the entire Middle East and North Africa. Until now, no single study has looked at every theatrical and musical institute in these countries. Many of the opera theatres that are examined here have had very little written about them at all. This work fills this void in order to provide scholars and practitioners in the sector with the first reference work on the subject that will help our understanding of the evolutionary process that has led--and continues to lead--all the countries in the MENA regi.
ISBN: 9781527539785Publication Date: 2019 -
Muslim preaching in the Middle East and beyond : historical and contemporary case studies
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Explores the ways in which Muslims relate various forms of religious oratory to authoritative tradition in 21st-century Islamic practice, while striving to adapt to local contexts and the changing circumstances of politics, media and society.
ISBN: 9781474467490Publication Date: 2020 -
Images of Enchantment
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"This book brings a new approach to the study of the arts of the Middle East. By dealing in one volume with dance, music, painting, and cinema, as experienced and practiced not only within the Middle East but also abroad, Images of Enchantment breaks down the artificial distinctions - of form, geography, 'high' and 'low' art, performer and artist - that are so often used to delineate the subjects and processes of Middle Eastern artistic culture." "The eighteen essays in this book cover themes as diverse as Bedouin dance, the music of Arab Americans, cinema in Egypt and Iran, Hollywood representations of the Middle East, and contemporary Sudanese painting. The contributions come from scholars and critics and from the artists themselves. Together, they present a wide-ranging and holistic view of the arts in their social, political, anthropological, and gender contexts."
ISBN: 9781417523160Publication Date: 1998-01-01
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Close Relations : Spaces of Greek and Roman Theatre
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The ""spatial turn"" of the 1990s has inspired many academics to re-evaluate the importance of space and time within their own disciplines and to engage in productive dialogue with other disciplines whose spatial focus intersects with their own. This book applies insights and approaches generated by the ""spatial turn"" to Greek and Roman theatre. The title evokes the ""close relations"" that exist between the many aspects and notions of space-time and their complex interweaving, between the disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches that are needed to understand complex spatial phenomena,
ISBN: 9781527551404Publication Date: 2020 -
Public and Performance in the Greek Theatre
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Peter Arnott discusses Greek drama not as an antiquarian study but as a living art form. He removes the plays from the library and places them firmly in the theatre that gave them being. Invoking the practical realities of stagecraft, he illuminates the literary patterns of the plays, the performance disciplines, and the audience responses. Each component of the productions - audience, chorus, actors, costume, speech - is examined in the context of its own society and of theatre practice in general, with examples from other cultures. Professor Arnott places great emphasis on the practical staging of Greek plays, and how the buildings themselves imposed particular constraints on actors and writers alike. Above all, he sets out to make practical sense of the construction of Greek plays, and their organic relationship to their original setting.
ISBN: 9780203129401Publication Date: 2002-09-11 -
Mythologizing Performance
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Building on numerous original close readings of works by Homer, Hesiod, and other ancient Greek poets, Richard P. Martin articulates a broad and precise poetics of archaic Greek verse. The ancient Greek hexameter poetry of such works as the Iliad and the Odyssey differ from most modern verbal art because it was composed for live, face-to-face performance, often in a competitive setting, before an audience well versed in mythological and ritual lore. The essays collected here span Martin's acclaimed career and explore ways of reading this poetic heritage using principles and evidence from the comparative study of oral traditions, literary and speech-act theories, and the ethnographic record. Among topics analyzed in depth are the narrative structures of Homer's epics, the Hesiodic Works and Days, and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo; the characterization of poetic and musical performers within the poems; the social context for verses ascribed to the legendary singer Orpheus; the significance of various rituals as stylized by poetic performances; and the interrelations, at the level of diction and theme, among the major genres of epic and hymn, as well as "genres of speaking" such as lament, praise, advice, and proverbial wisdom.
ISBN: 9781501713095Publication Date: 2020-10-15
Databases
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Academic eBook Collection This link opens in a new window This growing collection contains a large selection of multidisciplinary eBook titles representing a broad range of academic subject matter. 135,000 + eBooks.
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AfricaBibTip: try searching “ritual” or browsing by region/country
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Digital Theatre+ This link opens in a new window
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Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window Contains the full text of about 100,000 out of 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700).
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Ebook Central This link opens in a new window Contains over 80,000 academic multidisciplinary ebooks across the academic spectrum, including books in business, economics, careers, computers, law, medicine, and the natural and social sciences.
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Humanities International Complete This link opens in a new window Full text of hundreds of journals, books and other published sources from around the world.
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JSTOR This link opens in a new window A scholarly journal archive. Economics, history, math, philosophy, political science, language and literature, sociology, botany, and ecology. Holdings: Varies; from the 1800s - late 2000s
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National Archives: Native American Communities ArchiveTip: See the Native Communities link for regional research guides to locate Indigenous communities geographically throughout the United States
Other Online Resources
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Natyashastra (Ch. VI - The Sentiments/Rasa) The English translation of the Natyashastra, a Sanskrit work on drama, performing arts, theater, dance, music and various other topics.
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Noh as Intermedia from Stanford University Six centuries ago, the co-creator and great playwright and theorist of Noh Theater, Zeami, linked the plays' success to the cultivation and the 'coming together' of text, visuals and music. Today, the expressive interaction of these three layers might be called intermedia. Whereas the individual artistic elements of Noh have been studied extensively, the interactions between them are relatively underdiscussed. This project is intended to contribute to the understanding and appreciation of Noh by offering in-depth intermedia analysis of two plays, introductions to elements of Noh, and a general discussion about Noh as intermedia.
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Video Dictionary of Kathakali Mudras created by Kalamandalam Barbara Vijayakumar Kathakali evolved from earlier temple art forms in the 17th century, is based on Hinduism and is a highly charged powerful drama that combines devotion, drama, dance, music, costumes and make-up to produce one of the most impressive forms of sacred theatre in the world.