Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Print: Drama and Cultural Consumption in 19th-Century Edo

FAIN: FA-52926-07

Jonathan Elias Zwicker
Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1382)

"Stage and Spectacle in an Age of Print" is a book project which looks at the intersection of the theater and print culture in nineteenth-century Japan. This work aims to situate theater history within a larger context of cultural consumption by an examination of printed theater ephemera. For most of the twentieth century, the archive of ephemera was either neglected as beyond the ken of theater history proper or it was used for purely documentary purposes, to recreate the event of the performance. What would we see, my project asks, if we use this material not to reconstruct the elusive history of performance but to document the way in which the theater itself was consumed, collected, and archived in print across the nineteenth century?