BEN LEVITAS
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199253432
- eISBN:
- 9780191719196
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253432.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter examines the early debates over the need for an Irish national theatre. It suggests that the crisis surrounding the Parnellite split of 1890 and death of C. S. Parnell in 1891 was key. ...
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This chapter examines the early debates over the need for an Irish national theatre. It suggests that the crisis surrounding the Parnellite split of 1890 and death of C. S. Parnell in 1891 was key. In the 1880s, melodrama written by Hubert O'Grady and J. W. Whitbread resonated with Nationalist optimism: its continued popularity should be associated with Irish Parliamentary Party momentum. However, the complexity of 1890s divisions saw a Parnellite minority adopt a notionally ‘modern’ wave of literary experiment led by Yeats, and analysed by Shaw. Ibsen was also an important touchstone. Newspapers like United Ireland became forums for cultural political debate also manifest in the emergence of the National Literary Society (1892) and the Gaelic League (1893). Such debates were alert both to the cultural dimension of politics and to the social complexity of an Ireland that had begun to consider issues of class and gender.Less
This chapter examines the early debates over the need for an Irish national theatre. It suggests that the crisis surrounding the Parnellite split of 1890 and death of C. S. Parnell in 1891 was key. In the 1880s, melodrama written by Hubert O'Grady and J. W. Whitbread resonated with Nationalist optimism: its continued popularity should be associated with Irish Parliamentary Party momentum. However, the complexity of 1890s divisions saw a Parnellite minority adopt a notionally ‘modern’ wave of literary experiment led by Yeats, and analysed by Shaw. Ibsen was also an important touchstone. Newspapers like United Ireland became forums for cultural political debate also manifest in the emergence of the National Literary Society (1892) and the Gaelic League (1893). Such debates were alert both to the cultural dimension of politics and to the social complexity of an Ireland that had begun to consider issues of class and gender.
BEN LEVITAS
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199253432
- eISBN:
- 9780191719196
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253432.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History
This chapter tracks the impact on the theatre of the radicalisation of Irish politics following the General Election of 1910. The momentary success of the Home Rule Bill (1912) is set against the ...
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This chapter tracks the impact on the theatre of the radicalisation of Irish politics following the General Election of 1910. The momentary success of the Home Rule Bill (1912) is set against the 1913 Dublin lockout and the Irish Volunteer movements. Left politics, voiced by Larkin and Connolly, are considered resonant with the theatre of Robinson, O'Kelly, St John Ervine, Thomas Murray, Fitzmaurice, and Gerald MacNamara. Left-literati alliances were re-forged against the conservative nationalism of William Martin Murphy and Griffith. The First World War drove republican logics to the fore; indicated both by the pessimism of Wilson's The Slough and the excited radicalism of MacDonagh, Eimar O'Duffy, and Patrick Pearse himself. Republicanism, indicated by Pearse's references to Ibsen and Synge, is shown as having absorbed theatrical forces of display, to be reiterated in the Easter Rising of 1916.Less
This chapter tracks the impact on the theatre of the radicalisation of Irish politics following the General Election of 1910. The momentary success of the Home Rule Bill (1912) is set against the 1913 Dublin lockout and the Irish Volunteer movements. Left politics, voiced by Larkin and Connolly, are considered resonant with the theatre of Robinson, O'Kelly, St John Ervine, Thomas Murray, Fitzmaurice, and Gerald MacNamara. Left-literati alliances were re-forged against the conservative nationalism of William Martin Murphy and Griffith. The First World War drove republican logics to the fore; indicated both by the pessimism of Wilson's The Slough and the excited radicalism of MacDonagh, Eimar O'Duffy, and Patrick Pearse himself. Republicanism, indicated by Pearse's references to Ibsen and Synge, is shown as having absorbed theatrical forces of display, to be reiterated in the Easter Rising of 1916.
K. M. Newton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748636730
- eISBN:
- 9780748652082
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748636730.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who responded to ideas about ...
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This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who responded to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the ‘death of tragedy’, the book argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the ‘Dionysian’ commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following World War II with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and postmodern anti-foundationalism. The book offers broad coverage of drama and fiction by British, European and American writers and provides readings of particular texts including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Brecht's Mother Courage, Chekhov's Three Sisters, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Shaw's Saint Joan, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and D H Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love. Overall, the book combines literary interpretation with philosophical discussion, e.g. of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Rorty.Less
This book explores modern literature's responses to the tragic. It examines writers from the latter half of the nineteenth century through to the later twentieth century who responded to ideas about tragedy. Although Ibsen has been accused of being responsible for the ‘death of tragedy’, the book argues that Ibsen instead generates an anti-tragic perspective that had a major influence on dramatists such as Shaw and Brecht. By contrast, writers such as Hardy and Conrad, influenced by Schopenhauerean pessimism and Darwinism, attempt to modernise the concept of the tragic. Nietzsche's revisionist interpretation of the tragic influenced writers who either take pessimism or the ‘Dionysian’ commitment to life to an extreme, as in Strindberg and D. H. Lawrence. Different views emerge in the period following World War II with the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ and postmodern anti-foundationalism. The book offers broad coverage of drama and fiction by British, European and American writers and provides readings of particular texts including Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Brecht's Mother Courage, Chekhov's Three Sisters, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Shaw's Saint Joan, Miller's Death of a Salesman, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and D H Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love. Overall, the book combines literary interpretation with philosophical discussion, e.g. of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Derrida, Rorty.
Sos Eltis
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198121831
- eISBN:
- 9780191671340
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198121831.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature, Drama
Oscar Wilde's coupling of his own well-received, commercially successful dramas with the unperformed and relatively unknown drama of George Bernard Shaw was both generous and unexpected. Wilde ...
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Oscar Wilde's coupling of his own well-received, commercially successful dramas with the unperformed and relatively unknown drama of George Bernard Shaw was both generous and unexpected. Wilde detected a close kinship between his own work and the radically challenging, socially concerned plays of his fellow Irishman. Yet critics of Wilde's plays have most frequently grouped him with the more conventional popular playwrights who dominated the London stage with their reassuringly orthodox ‘well-made’ plays — plays which Shaw despised and whose hold on the theatre his own plays and those of his hero Ibsen were designed to break. In 1912, the playwright St. John Hankin criticized Wilde for having squandered his talents on writing popular plays which conformed to the fashions of the time.Less
Oscar Wilde's coupling of his own well-received, commercially successful dramas with the unperformed and relatively unknown drama of George Bernard Shaw was both generous and unexpected. Wilde detected a close kinship between his own work and the radically challenging, socially concerned plays of his fellow Irishman. Yet critics of Wilde's plays have most frequently grouped him with the more conventional popular playwrights who dominated the London stage with their reassuringly orthodox ‘well-made’ plays — plays which Shaw despised and whose hold on the theatre his own plays and those of his hero Ibsen were designed to break. In 1912, the playwright St. John Hankin criticized Wilde for having squandered his talents on writing popular plays which conformed to the fashions of the time.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195072389
- eISBN:
- 9780199787982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072389.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mencken was hired by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper he would be associated with for the rest of his life. As Sunday editor, he pushed for innovations such as new illustrations, printing changes, ...
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Mencken was hired by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper he would be associated with for the rest of his life. As Sunday editor, he pushed for innovations such as new illustrations, printing changes, and exciting articles on medicine, humor, music, and theater. However, Mencken once again began to feel restless. He wrote a book on Nietzsche, the first one published in the United States, and set forth his own iconoclastic views. He continued with his drama criticism, and broke away from Anglophile models by translating Henrick Ibsen's plays into colloquial American English. He thought about marriage, but felt that he did not have the time. He also met Theodore Dreiser.Less
Mencken was hired by the Baltimore Sun, the newspaper he would be associated with for the rest of his life. As Sunday editor, he pushed for innovations such as new illustrations, printing changes, and exciting articles on medicine, humor, music, and theater. However, Mencken once again began to feel restless. He wrote a book on Nietzsche, the first one published in the United States, and set forth his own iconoclastic views. He continued with his drama criticism, and broke away from Anglophile models by translating Henrick Ibsen's plays into colloquial American English. He thought about marriage, but felt that he did not have the time. He also met Theodore Dreiser.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195072389
- eISBN:
- 9780199787982
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195072389.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Mencken finds reprieve by becoming a drama critic. An older critic gives him valuable advice that becomes the mainstay of Mencken's style: in order to get a crowd, you must give them a show. Mencken ...
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Mencken finds reprieve by becoming a drama critic. An older critic gives him valuable advice that becomes the mainstay of Mencken's style: in order to get a crowd, you must give them a show. Mencken finds his true métier, and promotes the controversial and liberating plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. Professionally, he publishes a book of poetry (Ventures Into Verse) and becomes City Editor of the Herald. In his personal life, he begins to date actresses and starts a new musical group called, The Saturday Night Club.Less
Mencken finds reprieve by becoming a drama critic. An older critic gives him valuable advice that becomes the mainstay of Mencken's style: in order to get a crowd, you must give them a show. Mencken finds his true métier, and promotes the controversial and liberating plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. Professionally, he publishes a book of poetry (Ventures Into Verse) and becomes City Editor of the Herald. In his personal life, he begins to date actresses and starts a new musical group called, The Saturday Night Club.
George Pattison
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199698677
- eISBN:
- 9780191745553
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698677.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Theology
This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. ‘Modernism’ here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary ...
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This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. ‘Modernism’ here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary modernism associated with Georg Brandes, and such later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures as J. P. Jacobsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen (all often associated with Kierkegaard in early secondary literature), and the young Georg Lukacs. This movement, currently attracting increasing scholarly attention, fed into such varied currents of twentieth-century thought as Bolshevism (as in Lukacs himself), fascism, and the early existentialism of, e.g., Shestov and the radical culture journal The Brenner (in which Kierkegaard featured regularly, and whose readers included Martin Heidegger). Each of these movements has, arguably, its own ‘Romantic’ aspect and Kierkegaard thus emerges as a figure who holds together or in whom are reflected both the aspirations and contradictions of early romanticism and its later nineteenth- and twentieth-century inheritors. Kierkegaard's specific ‘staging’ of his authorship in the contemporary life of Copenhagen, then undergoing a rapid transformation from being the backward capital of an absolutist monarchy to a modern, cosmopolitan city, provides a further focus for the volume. In this situation the early Romantic experience of nature as providing a source of healing and an experience of unambiguous life is transposed into a more complex and, ultimately, catastrophic register. In articulating these tensions, Kierkegaard's authorship provided a mirror to his age but also anticipated and influenced later generations who wrestled with their own versions of this situation.Less
This book looks at Kierkegaard with a fresh perspective shaped by the history of ideas, framed by the terms romanticism and modernism. ‘Modernism’ here refers to the kind of intellectual and literary modernism associated with Georg Brandes, and such later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures as J. P. Jacobsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Ibsen (all often associated with Kierkegaard in early secondary literature), and the young Georg Lukacs. This movement, currently attracting increasing scholarly attention, fed into such varied currents of twentieth-century thought as Bolshevism (as in Lukacs himself), fascism, and the early existentialism of, e.g., Shestov and the radical culture journal The Brenner (in which Kierkegaard featured regularly, and whose readers included Martin Heidegger). Each of these movements has, arguably, its own ‘Romantic’ aspect and Kierkegaard thus emerges as a figure who holds together or in whom are reflected both the aspirations and contradictions of early romanticism and its later nineteenth- and twentieth-century inheritors. Kierkegaard's specific ‘staging’ of his authorship in the contemporary life of Copenhagen, then undergoing a rapid transformation from being the backward capital of an absolutist monarchy to a modern, cosmopolitan city, provides a further focus for the volume. In this situation the early Romantic experience of nature as providing a source of healing and an experience of unambiguous life is transposed into a more complex and, ultimately, catastrophic register. In articulating these tensions, Kierkegaard's authorship provided a mirror to his age but also anticipated and influenced later generations who wrestled with their own versions of this situation.
Leonardo Lisi
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245321
- eISBN:
- 9780823252541
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the ...
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This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.Less
This book argues that two ways of understanding the aesthetic organization of literary works have been inherited from the late 18th century and dominate discussions of European modernism today: the aesthetics of autonomy, associated with the self-sufficient work of art, and the aesthetics of fragmentation, practiced by the avant-gardes. Yet both of these models rest on assumptions about the nature of truth and existence that cannot be treated as exhaustive of modernist form. The present book accordingly traces an alternative aesthetics of dependency that provides a different formal structure, philosophical foundation, and historical condition for modernist texts. Taking Europe's Scandinavian periphery as its point of departure, the book examines how Søren Kierkegaard and Henrik Ibsen imagined a response to the changing conditions of modernity different from those at the European core, one that subsequently influenced Henry James, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, and James Joyce. Combining close readings with a broader revision of the nature and genealogy of modernism, Marginal Modernity challenges what we understand by modernist aesthetics, their origins, and their implications for how we conceive of our relation to the modern world.
Scarlett Baron
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199693788
- eISBN:
- 9780191732157
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199693788.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, European Literature
Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes traces of Flaubert in Joyce’s early writing – the critical essays written between 1899 and 1902; entries in the Paris and Pola ‘Commonplace Book’ that Joyce kept in ...
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Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes traces of Flaubert in Joyce’s early writing – the critical essays written between 1899 and 1902; entries in the Paris and Pola ‘Commonplace Book’ that Joyce kept in 1902–3 and then 1903–4; the short snippets of dramatic or narrative writing, collected between 1900 and 1903, to which he referred as ‘epiphanies’; and Stephen Hero. Contrary to W. B. Yeats’s assertion that Flaubert’s works were difficult to obtain in early twentieth-century Dublin, this chapter establishes that a number of Flaubert’s books were available to Joyce at the National Library of Ireland at that time, and, even more significantly, that Joyce purchased his own copies of both Madame Bovary and L’éducation sentimentale, in original French editions, as early as 1901. Even at this early stage, Flaubertian echoes adumbrate the importance of Joyce’s intertextual relationship to his French precursor in later works.Less
Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes traces of Flaubert in Joyce’s early writing – the critical essays written between 1899 and 1902; entries in the Paris and Pola ‘Commonplace Book’ that Joyce kept in 1902–3 and then 1903–4; the short snippets of dramatic or narrative writing, collected between 1900 and 1903, to which he referred as ‘epiphanies’; and Stephen Hero. Contrary to W. B. Yeats’s assertion that Flaubert’s works were difficult to obtain in early twentieth-century Dublin, this chapter establishes that a number of Flaubert’s books were available to Joyce at the National Library of Ireland at that time, and, even more significantly, that Joyce purchased his own copies of both Madame Bovary and L’éducation sentimentale, in original French editions, as early as 1901. Even at this early stage, Flaubertian echoes adumbrate the importance of Joyce’s intertextual relationship to his French precursor in later works.
Liesl Olson
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195368123
- eISBN:
- 9780199867639
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195368123.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter examines James Joyce’s depiction of ordinary experience, beginning with his youthful hero-worship of Henrik Ibsen. Inspired by Ibsen’s poetics of the everyday, Joyce’s ...
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This chapter examines James Joyce’s depiction of ordinary experience, beginning with his youthful hero-worship of Henrik Ibsen. Inspired by Ibsen’s poetics of the everyday, Joyce’s early writings attempt to represent life “as we see it before our eyes,” as evinced by the fragments known as “Epiphanies” and extended in later writings even as Joyce leaves his theory of epiphany behind. Epiphanies are linked with a desire to aestheticize experience, one of Stephen Dedalus’s dominant tendencies, but this desire is dangerous largely because it extracts the individual from a context of community and civic commitment. Alternatively, the depiction of banal, daily routines in Ulysses demonstrates how Joyce’s everyday does not evade historical conditions. Ulysses is also attentive to the limitations of the everyday, acknowledging the inability to trace and catalogue every fact of an individual’s life. The lists in Ulysses aim to record the variety of ordinary things that flood experience, while gleefully acknowledging realism’s defeat. The list introduces a more modest ordinary style than the epiphany: the equality of the list works against the desire to read and interpret particular moments (in a life and in a novel) as more or less important.Less
This chapter examines James Joyce’s depiction of ordinary experience, beginning with his youthful hero-worship of Henrik Ibsen. Inspired by Ibsen’s poetics of the everyday, Joyce’s early writings attempt to represent life “as we see it before our eyes,” as evinced by the fragments known as “Epiphanies” and extended in later writings even as Joyce leaves his theory of epiphany behind. Epiphanies are linked with a desire to aestheticize experience, one of Stephen Dedalus’s dominant tendencies, but this desire is dangerous largely because it extracts the individual from a context of community and civic commitment. Alternatively, the depiction of banal, daily routines in Ulysses demonstrates how Joyce’s everyday does not evade historical conditions. Ulysses is also attentive to the limitations of the everyday, acknowledging the inability to trace and catalogue every fact of an individual’s life. The lists in Ulysses aim to record the variety of ordinary things that flood experience, while gleefully acknowledging realism’s defeat. The list introduces a more modest ordinary style than the epiphany: the equality of the list works against the desire to read and interpret particular moments (in a life and in a novel) as more or less important.
David Strand
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520267367
- eISBN:
- 9780520948747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520267367.003.0008
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Memorial services for Sun Yat-sen took place all over China in the weeks following his death. The assemblies, rallies, and parades, large and small, featured both old and new styles of public ...
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Memorial services for Sun Yat-sen took place all over China in the weeks following his death. The assemblies, rallies, and parades, large and small, featured both old and new styles of public mourning, including tables laden with incense and ritual offerings of food, as well as flower arrangements and a performance by a girls' choir. Sun was described as a national hero exactly as he had represented himself. Popular acclaim in death was all the more remarkable since segments of the political elite and the press retained doubts about Sun's contributions to China and the revolution. On the other hand, many editorialists had nothing but praise for Sun, comparing him not only to Washington but also to Confucius, Jesus, and, more obscurely, Dr. Stockmann, the upright fictional scourge of the complacent in Henrik Ibsen's play, Enemy of the People. But anger still lingered in some quarters about Sun's military suppression of Guangzhou merchants.Less
Memorial services for Sun Yat-sen took place all over China in the weeks following his death. The assemblies, rallies, and parades, large and small, featured both old and new styles of public mourning, including tables laden with incense and ritual offerings of food, as well as flower arrangements and a performance by a girls' choir. Sun was described as a national hero exactly as he had represented himself. Popular acclaim in death was all the more remarkable since segments of the political elite and the press retained doubts about Sun's contributions to China and the revolution. On the other hand, many editorialists had nothing but praise for Sun, comparing him not only to Washington but also to Confucius, Jesus, and, more obscurely, Dr. Stockmann, the upright fictional scourge of the complacent in Henrik Ibsen's play, Enemy of the People. But anger still lingered in some quarters about Sun's military suppression of Guangzhou merchants.
Kristin Gjesdal
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- March 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780190070762
- eISBN:
- 9780190070793
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190070762.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche offers a new interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s drama and brings to light new aspects of G. W. F. Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, especially their ...
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The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche offers a new interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s drama and brings to light new aspects of G. W. F. Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, especially their theorizing of drama and theater. This study emphasizes the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and demonstrates how drama functions as an artform that offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. In this way, The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche seeks to deepen and actualize the relationship between philosophy and drama—not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them can bring out the best in both.Less
The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche offers a new interpretation of Henrik Ibsen’s drama and brings to light new aspects of G. W. F. Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, especially their theorizing of drama and theater. This study emphasizes the centrality of philosophy of theater in nineteenth-century philosophy and demonstrates how drama functions as an artform that offers insight into human historicity and the conditions of modern life. In this way, The Drama of History: Ibsen, Hegel, Nietzsche seeks to deepen and actualize the relationship between philosophy and drama—not by suggesting that either philosophy or drama should have the upper hand, but by indicating how a sustained dialogue between them can bring out the best in both.
Kristin Gjesdal (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- December 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190467876
- eISBN:
- 9780190467913
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190467876.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of ...
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Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion, death, nihilism, identity, and a host of other topics of an existential and philosophical kind. It is no surprise that Ibsen’s work has gained the attention of philosophically minded readers from Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Freud, to Adorno, Cavell, and beyond. Once staged at avant-garde theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin, Ibsen is now a global phenomenon. The enigmatic character of Hedda Gabler remains intriguing to ever-new generations of actors, audiences, and readers. Through ten newly commissioned chapters written by leading voices in the fields of drama studies, European philosophy, Scandinavian studies, and comparative literature, this volume brings out the philosophical resonances of Hedda Gabler in particular and Ibsen’s drama more broadly.Less
Since its publication in 1890, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler has been a recurring point of fascination for readers, theater audiences, and artists alike. Newly married, yet utterly bored, the character of Hedda Gabler evokes reflection on beauty, love, passion, death, nihilism, identity, and a host of other topics of an existential and philosophical kind. It is no surprise that Ibsen’s work has gained the attention of philosophically minded readers from Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salomé, and Freud, to Adorno, Cavell, and beyond. Once staged at avant-garde theaters in Paris, London, and Berlin, Ibsen is now a global phenomenon. The enigmatic character of Hedda Gabler remains intriguing to ever-new generations of actors, audiences, and readers. Through ten newly commissioned chapters written by leading voices in the fields of drama studies, European philosophy, Scandinavian studies, and comparative literature, this volume brings out the philosophical resonances of Hedda Gabler in particular and Ibsen’s drama more broadly.
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804784085
- eISBN:
- 9780804784658
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804784085.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the domain of the theater and the radical investment in the dramatic revival of the 1890s. To many socialists the theater appeared to offer an oral, live, mutual experience, one ...
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This chapter examines the domain of the theater and the radical investment in the dramatic revival of the 1890s. To many socialists the theater appeared to offer an oral, live, mutual experience, one that was less mass oriented but more communal than print. Radical efforts to develop a theatrical counterpublic, however, were intensely reliant on the radical print community; in this sense, frustration with the political inadequacies of print media actually generated new points of contact between radical print and radical theater. Henrik Ibsen's plays Ghosts and A Doll's House were key texts in fomenting the radical turn to theater, and both were championed in the radical press. Theater for late Victorian radicals suggested the possibility of fusing together artistic and political purpose, yet theater developed within the movement as a mode of containment against the outsized anonymous public being newly formed by means of mass print.Less
This chapter examines the domain of the theater and the radical investment in the dramatic revival of the 1890s. To many socialists the theater appeared to offer an oral, live, mutual experience, one that was less mass oriented but more communal than print. Radical efforts to develop a theatrical counterpublic, however, were intensely reliant on the radical print community; in this sense, frustration with the political inadequacies of print media actually generated new points of contact between radical print and radical theater. Henrik Ibsen's plays Ghosts and A Doll's House were key texts in fomenting the radical turn to theater, and both were championed in the radical press. Theater for late Victorian radicals suggested the possibility of fusing together artistic and political purpose, yet theater developed within the movement as a mode of containment against the outsized anonymous public being newly formed by means of mass print.
K. M. Newton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748636730
- eISBN:
- 9780748652082
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748636730.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles' Oedipus the King, which is held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Ibsen, before he turned to ...
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Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles' Oedipus the King, which is held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Ibsen, before he turned to social realism, had written plays in verse, and one of the best known of these plays is Brand. Ghosts suggests that Ibsen was well aware that a move to social realism had major implications for tragedy. Like Oedipus, it is very much about the relationship between past and present. Its ending is almost as catastrophic as any in classical tragedy, with Oswald's mind being destroyed by congenital syphilis, inherited from his father but transmitted to him through his mother, and Mrs Alving finally being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to agree to his demand to kill him and thus put him out of his misery when his mind gives way.Less
Ibsen clearly has classical tragedy in mind in Ghosts, particularly Sophocles' Oedipus the King, which is held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be the exemplary tragedy. Ibsen, before he turned to social realism, had written plays in verse, and one of the best known of these plays is Brand. Ghosts suggests that Ibsen was well aware that a move to social realism had major implications for tragedy. Like Oedipus, it is very much about the relationship between past and present. Its ending is almost as catastrophic as any in classical tragedy, with Oswald's mind being destroyed by congenital syphilis, inherited from his father but transmitted to him through his mother, and Mrs Alving finally being faced with the dilemma of whether or not to agree to his demand to kill him and thus put him out of his misery when his mind gives way.
K. M. Newton
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748636730
- eISBN:
- 9780748652082
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748636730.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter illustrates the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on the tragic philosophy. The play in which the influence of Nietzsche is perhaps strongest is Ibsen's The Master Builder. In this play, ...
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This chapter illustrates the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on the tragic philosophy. The play in which the influence of Nietzsche is perhaps strongest is Ibsen's The Master Builder. In this play, Nietzschean oppositions are central to the play's dramatic structure. Auguste Strindberg, in The Father and Miss Julie, subjects traditional tragic form to restructuring and revision by confronting Nietzsche's negative critique, particularly his concept of ‘ressentiment’ and his claim that in the modern world ‘slave morality’ has gained ascendancy over ‘noble’ or ‘master morality’. Strindberg does not suggest any alternative to the tragic condition of being a woman, other than by adopting the strategies of ressentiment in the manner of Laura in The Father.Less
This chapter illustrates the influence of Nietzsche's ideas on the tragic philosophy. The play in which the influence of Nietzsche is perhaps strongest is Ibsen's The Master Builder. In this play, Nietzschean oppositions are central to the play's dramatic structure. Auguste Strindberg, in The Father and Miss Julie, subjects traditional tragic form to restructuring and revision by confronting Nietzsche's negative critique, particularly his concept of ‘ressentiment’ and his claim that in the modern world ‘slave morality’ has gained ascendancy over ‘noble’ or ‘master morality’. Strindberg does not suggest any alternative to the tragic condition of being a woman, other than by adopting the strategies of ressentiment in the manner of Laura in The Father.
M. Cody Poulton
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824833411
- eISBN:
- 9780824869151
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824833411.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
This chapter identifies the Taishō era and Henrik Ibsen with the birth of modern drama in Japan. It was also the birth of the shingeki movement, a fact that was borne out by another Ibsen production, ...
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This chapter identifies the Taishō era and Henrik Ibsen with the birth of modern drama in Japan. It was also the birth of the shingeki movement, a fact that was borne out by another Ibsen production, that of A Doll House, by Tsubouchi Shōyō's Literary Society in 1911. But it was not only “young men” who were affected by Ibsen's plays. Almost singlehandedly, the plays were responsible for the “new woman” (atarashii onna) phenomenon. This was a time when modern theatre and drama became major players in the rising bourgeois culture. In short, Taishō was an era when theatre became a key forum for the exchange of artistic, social, and political ideas in Japan and drama came into its own as a literary form.Less
This chapter identifies the Taishō era and Henrik Ibsen with the birth of modern drama in Japan. It was also the birth of the shingeki movement, a fact that was borne out by another Ibsen production, that of A Doll House, by Tsubouchi Shōyō's Literary Society in 1911. But it was not only “young men” who were affected by Ibsen's plays. Almost singlehandedly, the plays were responsible for the “new woman” (atarashii onna) phenomenon. This was a time when modern theatre and drama became major players in the rising bourgeois culture. In short, Taishō was an era when theatre became a key forum for the exchange of artistic, social, and political ideas in Japan and drama came into its own as a literary form.
Max Alvarez
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781617039249
- eISBN:
- 9781626740051
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781617039249.003.0002
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter begins with an examination of Mann’s upbringing in the hands of Theosophists at the “Lomaland” Theosophical commune near San Diego, where he was born Emile Anton Bundsmann in 1906. Mann, ...
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This chapter begins with an examination of Mann’s upbringing in the hands of Theosophists at the “Lomaland” Theosophical commune near San Diego, where he was born Emile Anton Bundsmann in 1906. Mann, whose Austrian Catholic father and Jewish-American mother converted to Theosophy, was exposed to arts and culture from infancy until 14. Upon joining his mother in New Jersey, Mann dropped out of high school to pursue acting work on the Manhattan stage. His theatrical career received a boost in 1927 when he was cast in a Broadway staging of Jean Bart’s The Squall. In 1931, Mann married his first wife and also appeared on stage for the last time in Henrik Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society, produced for the New York Repertory Company. The actor was fired after clashing with the show’s producer and subsequently chose to abandon acting in favour of the more powerful role of stage director.Less
This chapter begins with an examination of Mann’s upbringing in the hands of Theosophists at the “Lomaland” Theosophical commune near San Diego, where he was born Emile Anton Bundsmann in 1906. Mann, whose Austrian Catholic father and Jewish-American mother converted to Theosophy, was exposed to arts and culture from infancy until 14. Upon joining his mother in New Jersey, Mann dropped out of high school to pursue acting work on the Manhattan stage. His theatrical career received a boost in 1927 when he was cast in a Broadway staging of Jean Bart’s The Squall. In 1931, Mann married his first wife and also appeared on stage for the last time in Henrik Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society, produced for the New York Repertory Company. The actor was fired after clashing with the show’s producer and subsequently chose to abandon acting in favour of the more powerful role of stage director.
Kevin C. Karnes
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199957927
- eISBN:
- 9780199346011
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199957927.003.0003
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This chapter examines Max Klinger's wrestling with Richard Wagner's theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk. An avowed follower of Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, Klinger's produced, early in his ...
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This chapter examines Max Klinger's wrestling with Richard Wagner's theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk. An avowed follower of Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, Klinger's produced, early in his career,theoretical and graphic works that embrace Wagner's vision of a harmonious fusion of the various arts, while simultaneously rejecting the quasi-socialist utopian trappings in which Wagner framed his theories. Around the turn of the century, the chapter argues, Klinger stepped back from Wagner's visions to exploreHenrik Ibsen's dramatic notion of a dawning “Third Kingdom,” consisting in the harmonization of Christian morality with Classical veneration for physical beauty and sensuality. In this fusion of aesthetic and ethical sensibilities, glimpsed in Klinger's polychrome statue Beethoven (1902), the sculptor'sfollowers perceived hope for release from a host of psychological and spiritual tensions regarded as endemic in modern society. In that same statue, the artists of the Vienna Secession found inspiration for their own utopian project.Less
This chapter examines Max Klinger's wrestling with Richard Wagner's theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk. An avowed follower of Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer, Klinger's produced, early in his career,theoretical and graphic works that embrace Wagner's vision of a harmonious fusion of the various arts, while simultaneously rejecting the quasi-socialist utopian trappings in which Wagner framed his theories. Around the turn of the century, the chapter argues, Klinger stepped back from Wagner's visions to exploreHenrik Ibsen's dramatic notion of a dawning “Third Kingdom,” consisting in the harmonization of Christian morality with Classical veneration for physical beauty and sensuality. In this fusion of aesthetic and ethical sensibilities, glimpsed in Klinger's polychrome statue Beethoven (1902), the sculptor'sfollowers perceived hope for release from a host of psychological and spiritual tensions regarded as endemic in modern society. In that same statue, the artists of the Vienna Secession found inspiration for their own utopian project.
Attilio Favorini
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262014571
- eISBN:
- 9780262289672
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262014571.003.0016
- Subject:
- Neuroscience, Research and Theory
This chapter joins Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett with Sigmund Freud, Jerome Bruner, and Gerald Edelman—three playwrights with three kindred, twentieth-century memographers or ...
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This chapter joins Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett with Sigmund Freud, Jerome Bruner, and Gerald Edelman—three playwrights with three kindred, twentieth-century memographers or writers and thinkers about memory. The study of the correspondences between scientific conceptions of memory and the constructions of dramatists can contribute substantively to the histories of both drama and memory, and it is a shame that they have largely gone unnoticed. Memory has always been considered a variable, not a constant, in dramatic character; however, it had become a system property of character construction by the early twentieth century, even as it came to be considered a system property of the psyche or, later on, of the neuroanatomical connections responsible for the brain's ability to recognize and categorize perceived objects.Less
This chapter joins Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett with Sigmund Freud, Jerome Bruner, and Gerald Edelman—three playwrights with three kindred, twentieth-century memographers or writers and thinkers about memory. The study of the correspondences between scientific conceptions of memory and the constructions of dramatists can contribute substantively to the histories of both drama and memory, and it is a shame that they have largely gone unnoticed. Memory has always been considered a variable, not a constant, in dramatic character; however, it had become a system property of character construction by the early twentieth century, even as it came to be considered a system property of the psyche or, later on, of the neuroanatomical connections responsible for the brain's ability to recognize and categorize perceived objects.
