"Dramatic freaks," "a cataract of vapid talk," "an offence to taste"--such were the epithets coined by American critics in the late 19th century about the dramas of the "Bard of Bacteria," Henrik Ibsen. By the 1970s, however, attitudes had reversed. When Washington's Kennedy Center opened its new Eisenhower Theater, they premiered with Ibsen's A Doll's House. This shift in one century from rejection to acceptance, from avant-garde to establishment status, did not occur without considerable resistance. Schanke analyzes this evolution from iconoclast to icon. With actresses' essays and interviews about the playwright, index, bibliography, and illustrations of Ibsen productions.
A magnificent new biography of Henrik Ibsen, among the greatest of modern playwrights Henrik Ibsen (1820–1908) is arguably the most important playwright of the nineteenth century. Globally he remains the most performed playwright after Shakespeare, and Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, and Ghosts are all masterpieces of psychological insight. This is the first full-scale biography to take a literary as well as historical approach to the works, life, and times of Ibsen. Ivo de Figueiredo shows how, as a man, Ibsen was drawn toward authoritarianism, was absolute in his judgments over others, and resisted the ideas of equality and human rights that formed the bases of the emerging democracies in Europe. And yet as an artist, he advanced debates about the modern individual’s freedom and responsibility—and cultivated his own image accordingly. Where other biographies try to show how the artist creates the art, this book reveals how, in Ibsen’s case, the art shaped the artist.
Henrik Ibsen's drama is the most prominent and lasting contribution of the cultural surge seen in Scandinavian literature in the later nineteenth century. When he made his debut in Norway in 1850, the nation's literary presence was negligible, yet by 1890 Ibsen had become one of Europe's most famous authors. Contrary to the standard narrative of his move from restrictive provincial origins to liberating European exile, Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem show how Ibsen's trajectory was preconditioned on his continued embeddedness in Scandinavian society and culture, and that he experienced great success in his home markets. This volume traces how Ibsen's works first travelled outside Scandinavia and studies the mechanisms of his appropriation in Germany, Britain and France. Engaging with theories of book dissemination and world literature, and re-assessing the emergence of 'peripheral' literary nations, this book provides new perspectives on the work of this major figure of European literature and theatre.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the founder of modern theater, and his plays are performed all over the world. Yet in spite of his unquestioned status as a classic of the stage, Ibsen is often dismissed as a fuddy-duddy old realist, whose plays are of interest only because they remain the gateway to modern theater. In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism , Toril Moi makes a powerful case not just for Ibsen's modernity, but for his modernism. Situating Ibsen in his cultural context, she shows how unexpected his rise to world fame was, and the extent of his influence on writers such Shaw, Wilde, and Joyce who were seeking to escape the shackles of Victorianism. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism also rewrites nineteenth-century literary history; positioning Ibsen between visual art and philosophy, the book offers a critique of traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism. Modernism, Moi argues, arose from the ruins of idealism, the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. She also shows why Ibsen still matters to us today, by focusing on two major themes-his explorations of women, men, and marriage and his clear-eyed chronicling of the tension between skepticism and the everyday. This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism.
Ibsen’s plays rank among those most frequently performed world-wide, rivaled only by Brecht, Chekhov, Shakespeare, and the Greek tragedies. By the time Ibsen died in 1906, his plays had already conquered the theaters of the Western world. Inviting rapturous praise as well as fierce controversy, they were performed in Europe, North America, and Australia, contributing greatly to the theater, culture, and social life of these continents. Soon after Ibsen’s death, his plays entered the stages of East Asia - Japan, China, Korea - as well as Africa and Latin America. . But while there exist countless studies on Ibsen the dramatist and the significance of his plays within different cultures written mainly by literary scholars, none of them examine the ways in which Ibsen's plays were performed, or the impact of such performances on the theater, social life, and politics of these cultures. In Global Ibsen, contributors look at the way performances of Ibsen's plays address problems typical to modern societies all over the world, including: the inferior social status of women, the decay of bourgeois family life and values, religious fundamentalism, industrial pollution and corporate cover-up, and/or the loss of and search for identity.
At the end of Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House, Nora Helmer walks away from her family and comfortable life. It is 1879, late on a winter's night in Norway. She's alone, with little money and few legal rights. Guided by instinct and sustained by will, Nora sets off on a journey that impoverishes and radicalizes her, then strands her on the harsh Minnesota prairie. She's searching for love, purpose, and her true self, but struggles to be honest in a hostile world. Meanwhile, in 1918, a young university student tries to escape her family's bourgeois conformity as she unravels her grandfather's hidden shame and the fate of a shadowy feminist who vanished years earlier. With this inventive work of historical fiction, Swallow answers a question that has dogged theater audiences for A Doll's House: whatever happened to Nora Helmer? Masterfully crafted and painstakingly researched, the twin story lines of Searching for Nora combine to tell a powerful tale of redemption as they unfold over four decades in the fjords of Norway and the unforgiving American frontier. AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY: Wendy Swallow writes about women's challenges, now and in the tender past. A memoirist, journalist and professor, Swallow spent ten years working on Searching for Nora, traveling to Norway to interview Ibsen scholars and Norwegian historians, and driving across western Minnesota to hear the stories of immigrant grandparents and experience the wide, empty land. She is also the author of Breaking Apart: A Memoir of Divorce (Hyperion/Thea) and The Triumph of Love over Experience: A Memoir of Remarriage (Hyperion). Her work has been critically acclaimed by Publishers Weekly, Elle, Booklist, Newsday, and The Washington Post, among others, and reprinted in many magazines. She and her husband divide their time between Reno, Nevada, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts. AUTHOR HOME: Reno, NV
A major biography of one of the most important figures in modern drama, evoked through a biographical reading of his playsNorwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen achieved unparalleled success in his lifetime and remains one of the most important figures in modern drama. The culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, Evert Sprinchorn’s biography constructs Ibsen’s life through a biographical reading of his plays with provocative and insightful analyses of his works, placing them and their author within the social, political, and intellectual foment of nineteenth-century Europe. This thought-provoking book will captivate anyone interested in the history of drama and the foundations of modernism.
The first comprehensive study of the women in Ibsen’s life and work, this landmark book provides a close reading of actual and fictional women as it re-examines the biographical and critical record. In clear, much praised writing, Templeton traces patterns of gender throughout Ibsen’s plays, from the portrayals of women in the little known early dramas to the famous protagonists of A Doll House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and the women of the “last quartet.” Templeton offers a reappraisal of the debated question of Ibsen’s relation to feminism, arguing against a false and demeaning critical tradition, and provides important new information on the young women of Ibsen’s later years and their presence in his plays. The book has been praised as incisive, masterful, provocative, and — a rarity among scholarly books — accessible to the general reader. “Joan Templeton’s Ibsen’s Women is a book to contend with. Templeton is a major Ibsen scholar who has written a tonic evaluation of what a major dramatist actually wrought. A delight to read.” — Arnold Weinstein, Scandinavian Studies “Ibsen’s Women marks a paradigm shift in Ibsen scholarship, moving ‘the woman question’ from the marginal category of ‘an aspect of’ to the core of the dramatic oeuvre. This is dazzling close reading, sophisticated, rigorous, artful. Templeton’s command of her material is masterly.” — Mary Kay Norseng, Ibsen News and Comment “Why is A Doll House not dated? This is one of the questions Joan Templeton answers in this very important book. Her style is witty and graceful and blessedly free of jargon. Her text is aimed at a wide variety of readers.” — Barry Jacobs, The Boston Review of Books “A goldmine of information... The scope and wide-ranging coverage of this book make it indispensable for anybody wishing to teach or write about Ibsen.” — Toril Moi,Ibsen Studies “Rich and rewarding. The close textual analysis supports Templeton’s thesis that Ibsen’s plays and his women characters are quintessentially feminist. A strong argument for the connection between Ibsen’s women and Ibsen’s modernism. Recommended for all collections.” — Choice
