Introduction World Literature and Global Performance

Abstract

The six theatre scholars who have contributed to this special issue of Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film seek to account for the global scale of nineteenthcentury performance by establishing transnational frameworks for theatre studies, a field still often defined in terms of national traditions. For much of the long nineteenth century, performance was global and global culture depended as much on performance as on literature in print. The essays collected here demonstrate that ceaseless mobility across national borders helped to define the experience of writing for, performing in and going to the theatre throughout the nineteenth century. These essays also add a significant dimension to the burgeoning scholarly literature on global theatre by emphasising intersections between performance, print and other media and by documenting and analysing the practices of transnational adaptation and remediation across international lines that were ubiquitous in a pre-copyright age. They demonstrate that nineteenth-century theatre may have been as crucial as poetry or the novel to creating the borderless global world whose value is so often hotly debated today.