Annotation Yevgeny Vakhtangov pioneered Fantastic Realism through his innovative theatrical concepts. This book compiles new translations of his work on the art of theatre creating a primary source of original material on this theatrical master.

A vivid and provocative literary criticism of famous women writers from Virginia Woolf to Zelda Fitzgerald by a “gifted miniaturist biographer” (Joyce Carol Oates) The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America’s most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work of criticism. A gallery of unforgettable portraits—of Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle—as well as a provocative reading of such works as Wuthering Heights, Hedda Gabler, and the poems of Sylvia Plath, Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer’s reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

'Attempting no less a task than to demonstrate that Ibsen planned his last twelve plays, beginning with Pillars of Society, as a cycle paralleling exactly Hegel's account of the evolution of the human consciousness, The Phenomenology of Mind, Johnston offers a fresh look at the Norwegian master. Although there is little specific biographical data in support of the author's thesis, he argues compellingly for it in his analysis of the texts themselves. After discussing Hegel's dramatic method of exposition and Ibsen's philosophy, Johnston examines each of the twelve plays in considerable detail. Provocative and sophisticated in its approach, this volume should be widely available to scholars and advanced students of modern drama. ---Library Journal

This collection of essays, originally published over the last forty years in the journal Modern Drama, explores the drama of four of the most influential European proponents of modernism in the European Drama: Ibsen, Strandberg, Pirandello and Beckett.

This book argues that Shaw was a masterful reader of Ibsen's plays both as texts and as the cornerstone of the modern theatre. Dismantling the notion that Shaw distorted Ibsen to promote his own view of the world, and establishing Shaw’s initial interest in Ibsen as the poet of Peer Gynt, it chronicles Shaw’s important role in the London Ibsen campaign and exposes the falsity of the tradition that Shaw branded Ibsen as a socialist. Further, this study shows that Shaw’s famous but maligned The Quintessence of Ibsenism reflects Ibsen’s own anti-idealist notion of his work and argues that Shaw’s readings of Ibsen’s plays are pioneering analyses that anticipate later criticism. It offers new readings of Shaw’s “Ibsenist” plays as well as a comprehensive account of Ibsen’s importance for Shaw’s dramatic criticism, from his early journalism to Our Theatres of the Nineties, both as a weapon against the inanities of the Victorian stage and as the standard bearer for modernism.

Yevgeny Vakhtangov was a pioneering theatre artist who married Stanislavski’s demands for inner truth and sincerity with a quest for an imaginative form for every role and production. It is an invaluable companion volume to The Vakhtangov Sourcebook.

Henrik Ibsen's plays came at a pivotal moment in late nineteenth-century European modernity. They engaged his public through a strategic use of metaphors of house and home, which resonated with experiences of displacement, philosophical homelessness, and exile. The most famous of these metaphors - embodied by the titles of his plays A Doll's House, Pillars of Society, and The Master Builder - have entered into mainstream Western thought in ways that mask the full force of the reversals Ibsen performed on notions of architectural space. Analyzing literary and performance-related reception materials from Ibsen's lifetime, Mark B. Sandberg concentrates on the interior dramas of the playwright's prose-play cycle, drawing also on his selected poems. Sandberg's close readings of texts and cultural commentary present the immediate context of the plays, provide new perspectives on them for international readers, and reveal how Ibsen became a master of the modern uncanny.

Eynat-Confino goes beyond the usual consideration of Craig's purported theories of the actor, scenery, and the scene painter to get at the heart of Craig's idea of theater. She draws not only on the research of contemporary Craig scholars but on material hitherto unavailable--his writings and daybooks and the writings of friends. She ties Craig's encounter with Isadora Duncan to a decisive modification in his notion of movement. To have an instrument more controllable than the actor, he invented the über-­marionette, a giant puppet. Craig also invented the "Scene," a kinetic stage, the "screens" that brought him worldwide fame were simply an adaptation of this concept. Eynat-Confino argues that a scenario Craig wrote in 1905, here published for the first time, reveals a theosophical system like that of Blake, a system that was the main force motivating Craig's artistic quest. In her final chapter, she carefully examines the psychological, aesthetic, and circumstantial factors that kept Craig from completing his work to bring "friendliness--humor--love--ease--peace" to the world.