My final project is on the history of plays from different time periods and places. I am still gathering primary and secondary sources but I feel like I have made some decent progress. I found one play titled The Castle of Perseverance that similarly looks at the role of government like Antigone (my home source). It is from the medieval time period. Next, I found a Japanese play titled Kanadehon Chushingura which is from the early modern era, 1748. I think this one will be especially interesting because a Japanese playwright made a play that incorporated both Kanadehon Chushingura and Hamlet during the 19th century which a secondary source looks at. I also found a primary source from 19th-century America titled Uncle Tom's Cabin. While the name is extraordinarily familiar, I have not actually read any version of this play before.
I am still having trouble finding a good primary source of a play that is ancient and also not European as both my home source and The Castle or Perseverance are already European. I think I just need to keep brainstorming different combinations of search terms and be more/less specific with my keywords. Even though I have been using this strategy for the other sources I found, this one is proving to be more difficult.
Hi John, I think your focus on plays is similar to my topic focusing on Antigone, and I will be very interested to see what common threads you find between these different plays and what they reveal about their respective cultures. Although I have not been looking exclusively for plays, I have found that ancient India is a very rich source of literature and may help you find older Eastern works. As far as searching for articles and texts, the best advice that I have found is to not only vary the key terms but approach the entire question from different angles. For example, I am searching for literature containing political commentary and I have found that searching about the politics of an ancient culture will naturally lead to primary texts, while searching directly for primary texts often confuses the search engine.
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