Collaboration in the Arts from the Middle Ages to the Present

by Silvia Bigliazzi (Editor)

'Collaboration' is a complex cultural and political the combined practice of two or more artists, simultaneously or across time, or the willing (and therefore publicly reprehensible) collusion implied by the term's specifically historical meaning. These interdisciplinary essays propose collaboration as a strategy for ensuring creativity within a dynamic tradition, and as a means of mutual enrichment both between individuals and between disciplines. Writers from Chaucer to Wilde and Conrad are considered in this context, together with medieval iconography and German Romanticism. Yet collaboration as collusion and coercion are also implicated in diverse political and cultural agendas informed by xenophobic and exclusive, rather than inclusive, ideologies. Their impact spreads beyond the lives and minds of individual artists and individual texts to touch on the relationship between the citizen and the state, whether writers from the 'losing' side, the immigrant in Italy, writers who supported Fascisim, or the Roma in Britain.

221 pages, Hardcover

First published July 30, 2006

About the author

Professor Silvia Bigliazzi has specialized in Shakespeare and early modern English theatre, with a focus on the intersections with Classical and European drama. Her interests span Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry, including sonnet-writing and metaphysical poetry, scepticism and the culture of paradox, interart, translation and performance studies as well as narratology, semiotics of theatre and literary theory.

She is the Director of the Skenè Theatre and Drama Studies Research Centre at the University of Verona and team leader of DH projects.

She is Co-General Editor of the series Global Shakespeare Inverted, Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, Skenè. Texts and Studies, and Anglica, and has been awarded several fellowships: New York University (2017, 2018, 2019); Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (2022); All Souls College, Oxford.