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Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai: Transpositions of a 'Japanese Tragedy'

By (author) Arthur Groos

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Puccini's famous but controversial Madama Butterfly reflects a practice of 'temporary marriage' between Western men and Japanese women in nineteenth-century treaty ports. Groos' book identifies the plot's origin in an eye-witness account and traces its transmission via John Luther Long's short story and David Belasco's play. Archival sources, many unpublished, reveal how Puccini and his librettists imbued the opera with differing constructions of the action and its heroine. Groos's analysis suggests how they constructed a 'contemporary' music-drama with multiple possibilities for interpreting the misalliance between a callous American naval officer and an impoverished fifteen-year-old geisha, providing a more complex understanding of the heroine's presumed 'marriage'. As an orientalizing tragedy with a racially inflected representation of Cio-Cio-San, the opera became a lightning rod for identity politics in Japan, while also stimulating decolonizing transpositions into indigenous theatre traditions such as Bunraku puppet theatre and Takarazuka musicals.

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The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli
Paperback / softback
224 pages
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Originally published in Italian: L'ordine del tempo (Milan: Adelphi Edizioni, 2017).

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The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
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352 pages
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Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics

Carlo Rovelli
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208 pages
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