Staging Words presents new perspectives on Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela and their theater, by postulating that nation can be imagined and reconstructed through the deliberate performance of intertexts. The book shows how past artistic texts - other plays, stories, newspaper articles, songs, or paintings - can be manipulated and translated to create a new theatrical script, and that this new script can expose an innovative space for interpreting the nation. The introduction reviews theories of intertextuality, nation, and nationalism and applies them to Latin America. Each chapter studies two to three plays and shows how the intertexts open up hidden connections and border spaces within texts and between texts that the new writer and reader fill with significance, replacing the meaning of the pretext with their own. This new textual voice permits texts to be restaged, reconfigured, and imagined in a way that is purely Latin American.

The process of shaping cultural identity in colonial Spanish America has occurred as much through the medium of pictures as through the medium of writing. Focused on writing that references visual texts (ekphrasis), Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing examined the way words about pictures in the writing of three Spanish American Creoles negotiate the challenges that confronted the ruling elite in Spanish America during the contentious period between the Conquest and Independence.

Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones is the first full-length account of Ricardo Palma informed by theories of cultural criticism. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela sheds new light on important aspects of Palma’s work. She offers a fresh interpretation of the relations between history and literature – perhaps the most discussed aspect of Palma’s work – engaging with new critical thinking on historicism and examining the significance of the marginal and the anecdotal in Palma’s work. By using the tools of postcolonial cultural criticism, Vera Tudela considers Palma’s encounter with modernity, arguing that his recuperation of colonial history plays a crucial part in imagining the modern future. Most innovatively, Vera Tudela examines the multiple and contradictory notions of femininity in nineteenth-century Latin America and in Palma’s writing, showing how a historical consideration of the sexual politics of cultural production transforms our understanding of many of the assumptions about this period. Finally, by applying the insights of cultural geography in analysing the racial, sexual and political identity of domestic, urban and national space in Palma’s writing, Vera Tudela demonstrates that Palma’s literary maps and topographies are uniquely revelatory of questions of power and agency. In its exploration of sexual politics and nationhood, Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones presents Palma as a proto-modernist who paved the way for many of the experiments of twentieth-century Latin American narrative fiction.

From the colonial period to independence and into the twenty-first century, Latin American culture has been mapped as a subordinate “other” to Europe and the United States. This collection reconsiders geographical space and power and the ways in which theatrical and performance histories have been constructed throughout the Americas. Essays bridge political, racial, gender, class, and national divides that have traditionally restricted and distorted our understanding of Latin American theatre and performance. Contributors—scholars and artists from throughout the Americas, including well-known playwrights, directors, and performers—imagine how to reposition the Latina/o Americas in ways that offer agency to its multiple peoples, cultures, and histories. In addition, they explore the ways artists can create new maps and methods for their creative visions. Building on hemispheric and transnational models, this book demonstrates the capacity of theatre studies to challenge the up-down/North-South approach that dominates scholarship in the United States and presents a strong case for a repositioning of the Latina/o Americas in theatrical histories and practices.

Metapoetry in Euripides is the first detailed study of the self-conscious literary devices applied within Euripidean drama and how these are interwoven with issues of thematic importance, whether social, theological, or political. In the volume, Torrance argues that Euripides employed a complex system of metapoetic strategies in order to draw the audience's attention to the novelty of his compositions. The metapoetic strategies discussed include intertextual allusions to earlier poetic texts (especially to Homer, Aeschylus and Sophocles) which are often developed around unusual and memorable language or imagery, deployment of recognizable trigger words referring to plot construction, novelties or secondary status, and self-conscious references to fiction implied through allusion to writing. Torrance also looks at and compares metapoetic techniques used in tragedy, satyr-drama, and old comedy to demonstrate that the Greek tragedians commonly exploited metapoetic strategies, and that metapoetry is more pervasive in Euripides than in the other tragedians. While Euripides shares some metapoetic techniques with old comedy, these remain implicit in his tragedies (but not in his satyr-dramas).

"This book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance."--Publisher's website.

Since Argentina's transition to democracy, the expression of human fragility on the stage has taken diverse forms. This book examines the intervention of theatre and performance in the memory politics surrounding Argentina's return to democracy and makes a case for performance's transformative power.