Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River. However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories (Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference
Historians of theatre face the same temptations and challenges as other historians: they negotiate assumptions (their own and those of others) about national identity and national character; they decide what events and actors to highlight—or omit—and what framework and perspective to use for telling the story. Personal biases, trends in scholarship, and sociopolitical contexts influence all histories; and theatre histories, too, are often revised to reflect changing times and interests. This significant collection examines the problems and challenges of formulating national theatre histories.
Herodotus' "Histories can be read in many ways. Their literary qualities, never in dispute, can be more fully appreciated in the light of recent developments in the study of pragmatics, narratology, and orality. Their intellectual status has been radically reassessed: no longer regarded as naove and 'archaic', the "Histories are now seen as very much a product of the intellectual climate of their own day - not only subject to contemporary literary, religious, moral and social influences, but actively contributing to the great debates of their time.
