Locating Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century (CFP)

Call for Papers
Editors: Gabrielle Malcolm and Kelli Marshall / Cambridge Scholars Publishing

William Shakespeare has long been a global cultural commodity, but in the twenty-first century “Shakespeare” is oft positioned as a social concept with the man almost forgotten amidst the terminology that surrounds the criticism, tourism, adaptation, and utilization of the plays. For instance, the plays themselves are as often re-worked and adapted as performed wholly in their own right on stage. Moreover, there are currently well-established alternative strands, identities, and locations of “Shakespeare” (e.g., metanarratives, gender-reworking, inter-cultural adapting, online streaming), and the growth is as widespread and fast as technology, performance, social networking, and cinema will allow. It is this new and exciting approach to “Shakespeare,” which clearly suits both the adaptation process and the technology and mindset of the twenty-first century, that our volume will consider.

Potential topics for the anthology include the following:

• Shakespeare depicted on film and TV “outside” the mainstream: reality TV documentary from prison, schools, etc.
• Adaptation online: podcasts, webcasts, webisodes (e.g., Second City’s Sassy Gay Friend series), YouTube Shakespeare, Shakespeare on Twitter (e.g., Such Tweet Sorrow)
• Streaming live theatre: the National Theatre Live and not-so-live Hamlet and Lear experiments
• Meta-narratives of Shakespeare, positioning the works through embedded and presumed knowledge in adaptations
• Global Shakespeares located within and for national identities
• Shakespeare as illustrated text: graphic novels, animation, special effects
• And of course, any other ways of “locating Shakespeare in the twenty-first century”

Please send a 500-word abstract/synopsis of the project to Kelli Marshall by June 30, 2011. Complete essays of approximately 6,000 words would be expected around September 1, 2011.

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