Creating a Database for Theatre criticism in Greek literary journals, 1900-1950: Case Study

Abstract

Theatre criticism holds an important place in theatre studies, especially as a tool for studying theatre history and reception - it is one of the three main branches of theatrology along with theatre history and theory. This study aims to present the cataloguing, digitization and interpretive study of a body of theatre reviews published in Greek literary journals in the years 1900-1950.

The questions that we attempted to answer in this research concern various characteristics of theatre criticism in Greece in the period we are researching, and more specifically:

• The language used, its construction and function


• Its main representatives


• Its ideological and aesthetic axes


• The reception of the plays


• The connections to the European intellectual currents of the time


• The ways in which the nature of the publications (literary magazines) affected the thematic and structural organization of the texts, in contrast to the reviews published on the daily press.

As part of the same project, we also created a searchable electronic database, comprising a complete index of theatre criticism published in Greek journals in the years 1900-1950, which offers users access to the full reviews.