Keywords
Theatre, william inge, picnic, historiography
Abstract
Historiography is the writing of history based on the examination of sources and synthesizing these sources into a narrative that will stand the test of critical methods. Historiography is not the study of history but rather provides a tool to analyze each written account of a historical event. The concepts of historiography are traditionally reserved for the study of factual based history and not for fictional events or people. However, just as history seems to evolve over time, authors also revise their fiction work. If history is adapted and changed over time to fulfill the historian’s desires, can fictional works also be adapted to better fulfill the author’s intentions through the process of rewrites? Historiography allows us to understand that history is adapted and changed over time. Can the ideas of historiography be applied to fictional stories in order to understand why an author rewrites and revisits older works? How can a theatre practitioner understand and develop the most comprehensive version of a fictional text? Can he apply the same techniques used to deconstruct a historical event? Through a case study using William Inge’s classic play Picnic I explored the possibility of using historiography as a tool for theater practitioners in developing new dramatic texts that synthesize various scripts into one new comprehensive text. Through this case study I developed a framework which allows the theatre practitioner to apply the ideas of historiography to the analysis of a collection of fictional works by the same author in order to create a new text, showcasing the effectiveness of applying four cruxes of historiography to fictional texts.
Notes
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Graduation Date
2013
Semester
Spring
Advisor
Listengarten, Julia
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
College
College of Arts and Humanities
Department
Theatre
Degree Program
Theatre
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0004729
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004729
Language
English
Release Date
May 2013
Length of Campus-only Access
None
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Subjects
Arts and Humanities -- Dissertations, Academic, Dissertations, Academic -- Arts and Humanities
STARS Citation
Murphy, Nicholas, "Applying Historiography To Fictional Works: A Case Study Of William Inge's Picnic" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 2567.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/2567