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Special characters : genre and materiality on the modern stage / Sarah Balkin.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Balkin, Sarah, 1982- author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Strindberg, August, 1849-1912.
- Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900.
- Drama--19th century--History and criticism.
- Drama.
- Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906--Characters.
- Ibsen, Henrik.
- Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906.
- Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900--Characters.
- Wilde, Oscar.
- Strindberg, August, 1849-1912--Characters.
- Strindberg, August.
- Genre:
- Electronic books.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (178 pages)
- Place of Publication:
- Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press, [2019]
- System Details:
- text file
- Summary:
- Theater's materiality and reliance on human actors has traditionally put it at odds with modernist principles of aesthetic autonomy and depersonalization. Spectral Characters argues that modern dramatists in fact emphasized the extent to which humans are fictional, made and changed by costumes, settings, props, and spoken dialogue. Examining work by Ibsen, Wilde, Strindberg, Genet, Kopit, and Beckett, the book takes up the apparent deadness of characters whose selves are made of other people, whose thoughts become exteriorized communication technologies, and whose bodies merge with walls and furniture. The ghostly, vampiric, and telepathic qualities of these characters, Sarah Balkin argues, mark a new relationship between the material and the imaginary in modern theater. By considering characters whose bodies respond to language, whose attempts to realize their individuality collapse into inanimacy, and who sometimes don't appear at all, the book posits a new genealogy of modernist drama that emphasizes its continuities with nineteenth-century melodrama and realism.
- Contents:
- Chapter 1: The spectral individual: Ibsen's dead realism
- Chapter 2: Imaginary characters: Wilde's unrealized personalities
- Chapter 3: Language and materiality: Strindberg's vampiric narrators
- Chapter 4: Old new materialisms: Monist dramatury in Strindberg's The Black Glove
- Chapter 5: Modernist afterlives: Genet, Kopit, Beckett.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 158-177) and index.
- Description based on information from the publisher.
- ISBN:
- 9780472125821
- 0472125826
- Access Restriction:
- Restricted for use by site license.
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