Spectral characters : genre and materiality on the modern stage / Sarah Balkin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Balkin, Sarah, 1982- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Drama--19th century--History and criticism.

Drama.

Characters and characteristics in literature.

Human body in literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

viii, 190 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2019]

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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : melodrama and the material occult

The spectral individual : Ibsen's dead realism

Imaginary characters : Wilde's unrealized personalities

Language and materiality : Strindberg's vampiric narrators

Old new materialisms : monist dramaturgy in Strindberg's The black glove

Modernist afterlives : Genet, Kopit, Beckett.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references () and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Balkin, Sarah, 1982- author. Spectral characters

ISBN:

9780472131488

0472131486

OCLC:

1098220000