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E-book Restaging the Past : Historical Pageants, Culture and Society in Modern Britain

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Penilaian

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This book examines one of the most significant aspects of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. Historical pag-eants began as an Edwardian craze, but persisted as important events in communities and organisations across Britain for much of the next hundred years. Although popular interest in pageantry has undoubtedly declined, remnants of it survive and echoes still occur. A notable recent example is the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, created by Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce; this dramatically por-trayed the industrial revolution and its effects, inspired by the film-maker and anthologist Humphrey Jennings.1 There is widespread enthusiasm for the dramatic representation of the past in films and television pro-grammes, in period-costume theatres, such as Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and in the myriad uses of ‘living history’ in museums, country houses and other tourist attractions in Britain and beyond.2 Moreover, historical pageants themselves have enjoyed a small revival, in both fact and fiction. The next staging of the decennial pageant at Axbridge in Som-erset is planned for August 2021; the long-running BBC Radio 4 series The Archers featured a village pageant in 2016; and – as the penultimate chapter in this book explains – a regular pageant now takes place each year, staged on weekends throughout the summer, at Bishop Auckland in County Durham.3 The historical pageant craze – we might even call it a movement4 – began with Louis Napoleon Parker’s pageant at Sherborne, Dorset in 1905 (Fig. 1.1). This set the style, and in some cases the tone, for pageants of the Edwardian era and beyond. Although subsequent pag-eants varied in terms of length, style and content, the essential structure was largely unchanged: a series of dramatic representations of particular episodes in the history of a community or organisation. At Sherborne there were 11 such episodes, beginning with the foundation of the town by St Aldhelm in 705 ad and ending with the visit of Sir Walter Raleigh in 1593: for reasons explored elsewhere, many early twentieth-century pageants featured an Elizabethan finale.5 Later pageants often took the action forward to the nineteenth or even the twentieth century, but all shared the presentation of successive scenes from history (or sometimes prehistory and occasionally even the future). Pageants not infrequently blended fact and fiction, but they were always primarily concerned with the past and its representation in the present. Many pageants insisted on faithfulness to the historical record and strove for ‘authenticity’, as far as possible, in costume, dialogue and content.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

940 BAR r

Penerbit

London : UCL Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

346 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781787354050

Klasifikasi

940

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

HIstory of Europe

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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