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Best known as the story from the 1904 Puccini opera, the compelling modern myth of Madame Butterfly has been read, watched, and re-interpreted for over a century, from Pierre Loti's 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème to A.R. Gurney's 1999 play Far East. This fascinating collaborative volume examines the Madame Butterfly narrative in a wide variety of cultural contexts literary, musical, theatrical, cinematic, historical, and political and in a variety of media opera, drama, film, and prose narratives and includes contributions from a wide range of academic disciplines, such as Asian Studies, English Literature, Theatre, Musicology, and Film Studies. From its original colonial beginnings, the Butterfly story has been turned about and inverted in recent years to shed light back on the nature of the relationship between East and West, remaining popular in its original version as well as in retellings such as David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly and David Cronenberg's screen adaptation. The combined perspectives that result from this collaboration provide new and challenging insights into the powerful, resonant myth of a painful encounter between East and West Pre-texts. Inventing the Orient / Jonathan Wisenthal -- Texts. Mounting butterflies / Susan McClary ; Cio-Cio-San the geisha / Vera Micznik ; 'Re-Orienting' the vision : ethnicity and authenticity from Suzuki to Comrade Chin / Melinda Boyd ; That old familiar song : the theatre of culture in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly / Kate McInturff -- Intertexts. Late mutations of cinema's Butterfly / Bart Testa ; White Nagasaki/White Japan and a post-atomic Butterfly : Joshua Logan's Sayonara (1957) / Brian McIlroy ; Playing Butterfly with David Henry Hwang and Robert Lepage / Sherrill Grace -- Contexts. Madame Butterfly and the absence of empire / Richard Cavell ; The taming of the Oriental shrew : the two Asias in Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Turandot / Maria Ng ; Iron Butterfly : Cio-Cio-San and Japanese imperialism / Joshua S. Mostow ; Madame Butterfly : behind every great woman ... / Joy James ; M. Butterfly : staging choices and their meanings / Rachel Ditor and Jan Selman.
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