Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism

Art, Theater, Philosophy
Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-0-19-920259-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 416 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 233 mm, Gewicht: 642 g

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 boring 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 also for his modernism.

Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism situates Ibsen in his cultural context, emphasizes his position as a Norwegian in European culture, and shows how important painting and other visual arts were for his aesthetic education. The book rewrites literary history, reminding modern readers that idealism was the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. Modernism was born in the ruins of idealism, Moi argues, thus challenging traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism.

By reading Ibsen's modernist plays as investigations of the fate of love in an age of skepticism, Moi shows why Ibsen still matters to us. In this book, Ibsen's plays are showed to be profoundly concerned by theater and theatricality, both on stage and in everyday life. Ibsen's unsettling explorations of women, men, and marriage here emerge as chronicles of the tension between skepticism and the everyday, and between critique and utopia in modernity.

This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Skandinavische Literaturen
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Theaterwissenschaft Theatergeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- An Ibsen Chronology

- Introduction

- Part I: Ibsen's Place in History

- 1: Ibsen and the Ideology of Modernism

- 2: Postcolonial Norway? Ibsen's Cultural Resources

- 3: Rethinking Literary History: Idealism, Realism, and the Birth of Modernism

- 4: Ibsen's Visual World: Spectacles, Painting, Theater

- Part II: Ibsen's Modern Breakthrough

- 5: The Idealist Straitjacket: Ibsen's Early Aesthetics

- 6: Becoming Modern: Modernity and Theater in Emperor and Galilean

- Part III: Ibsen's Modernism: Love in an Age of Skepticism

- 7: 'First and Foremost a Human Being': Idealism, Theater, and Gender in A Doll's House

- 8: Losing Touch with the Everyday: Love and Language in The Wild Duck

- 9: Losing Faith in Language: Fantasies of Perfect Communication in Rosmersholm

- 10: The Art of Transformation: Art, Marriage, and Freedom in The Lady From the Sea

- Epilogue: Idealism and the 'Bad' Everyday

- Appendix 1: Synopsis of Emperor and Galilean

- Appendix 2: Translating Ibsen

Über Autor(innen)

Toril Moi was born and raised in Norway, and worked in England in the 1980s, before moving to Duke University in 1989, where she is now the James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. She is the author of influential books on feminist theory and on Simone de Beauvoir.