Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Re-Enactment History)

Since The Late 1700s New Forms Of Visual Entertainment Have Tried To Simulate The Details Of Nature: Reenactment Has Now Become The Most Widely-consumed Form Of Popular History. This Book Engages With The Quest For Definition And Appropriate Delimitation Of Reenactment As Well As Questions About The Relationship Between Realism And Affect. Edited By Iain Mccalman, Paul A. Pickering. Since the late 1700s new forms of visual entertainment have tried to simulate the details of nature: reenactment has now become the most widely-consumed form of popular history. This book engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as questions about the relationship between realism and affect. What was it like to live in the past? How did it feel? Ever since the late eighteenth century when new forms of visual entertainment claimed to be able to use technology to replicate or simulate the literal details of nature, scholars, poets and intellectuals have bemoaned the increasing dominance of the realist aesthetic. More recently reenactment has become the most widely consumed form of popular history. The essays in the volume engage with the quest for a definition and an appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as the philosophical and practical questions revolving around the vexed relationship between realism and affect. Exploring these questions is aided by attention to genre and to that end many of the essays here explore the place of reenactment in pursuits within and beyond the academy -- history, literature, music, theatre, dance, the law, film, television, public commemoration and historical tourism Front Matter....Pages i-xi From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda....Pages 1-17 ‘...Just as It would have been in 1861’: Stuttering Colonial Beginnings in ABC’s Outback House....Pages 18-38 ‘Recreating Chaos’: Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave....Pages 39-49 On Being a Mobile Monument: Historical Reenactments and Commemorations....Pages 50-62 What Should We Do about Slavery? Slavery, Abolition and Public History....Pages 63-78 Reenactment and Neo-Realism....Pages 79-89 Textual Realism and Reenactment....Pages 90-108 ‘No Witnesses. No Leads. No Problems’: The Reenactment of Crime and Rebellion....Pages 109-133 R. G. Collingwood, Historical Reenactment and the Early Music Revival....Pages 134-158 ‘From Wigwam to White Lights’: Popular Culture, Politics, and the Performance of Native North American Identity in the Era of Assimilationism....Pages 159-179 Mimic Toil: Eighteenth-Century Preconditions for the Modern Historical Reenactment....Pages 180-199 Loutherbourg’s Simulations: Reenactment and Realism in Late-Georgian Britain....Pages 200-217 Back Matter....Pages 218-229 This text engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as questions about the relationship between realism and affect