The Reception of the texts and images of ancient Greece in late twentieth-century drama and poetry in English

This project has been established to document and analyse the theatrical and literary surge of interest in Greek texts and drama which is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century.We are currently examining ways of documenting the processes of performance creation, including interviews with translators, directors and designers. The data base will be designed so that it can be searched for the careers of individuals and theatre companies as well as for Greek and modern authors, plays, themes and reviews. The aim is to enable Reception studies to address issues of performance with the same degree of rigour and attention to evidence which is expected in textual studies and to develop ways of documenting performance which recognise its cross disciplinary and creative dimensions. It is hoped that the data base will also, in conjunction with the case studies, provide a corpus of material to which cultural historians working on the late twentieth century will be able to refer in the future