Theatres of Memory
Past and Present in Contemporary Culture
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Theatres of Memory was first published in 1994, it transformed the debate about what is to be considered history and questioned the role of “heritage” that lies at the heart of every Western nation’s obsession with the past. Today, in the age of Downton Abbey and Mad Men, we are once again conjuring historical fictions to make sense of our everyday lives.
In this remarkable book, Samuel looks at the many different ways we use the “unofficial knowledge” of the past. Considering such varied areas as the fashion for “retrofitting,” the rise of family history, the joys of collecting old photographs, the allure of reenactment societies and televised adaptations of Dickens, Samuel transforms our understanding of the uses of history. He shows us that history is a living practice, something constantly being reassessed in the world around us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The mania for a ``lost England''--manifest in TV costume dramas, railway preservation, cottage-style houses and the revival of historic ports--is not necessarily a reactionary, nostalgic phenomenon, argues British social historian Samuel. He views the ``heritage'' movement as a counterweight to excessive modernization--perhaps a consolation for Britain's loss of world leadership, but in any event a bid to preserve natural and cultural environments under threat. Samuel perceives a ``retrochic'' style, which exalts the recent past and unnoticed beauties of everyday life, in Merchant-Ivory films, period clothes, documentary photographs and ``olde worlde'' pubs. This sophisticated study also deciphers Edwardian shopping streets and Victorian fairs, analyzes class stereotypes in the movie The Elephant Man and unravels the ``contrived authenticities'' of film and stage versions of Dickens's novels.
