Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2022.2063982
Tanya Thresher
Written by leading Ibsen scholars, the thirty relatively short essays that constitute Ibsen in Context provide readers with a clear overview of the key contexts that have informed Ibsen’s life, work, and status as a world dramatist. More specifically this collection challenges the practice of isolating the dramatist from his socio-historical contexts and treating his final twelve plays in particular as a self-contained aesthetic whole. On the premise that Ibsen, “could not escape his own context, and that literary autonomy is itself contingent on extra-literary preconditions, like the ability to live from one’s authorship, being protected by copyright, or being received with a certain reverence in appropriating cultures” (xvi), the essays embed the playwright into five general categories: “Life and Career,” “Culture and Society,” “Scandinavian Reception,” “Internationalization,” and “Afterlives.” This holistic contextualization of Ibsen from the time of his writing until today broadens the interpretative possibilities for his works and underscores the importance of the larger socio-cultural European and global contexts for the dramatist. The first three essays that make up Part I, “Life and Career,” are all written by Narve Fulsås and trace the cultural and sociopolitical Scandinavian contexts of Ibsen's early life and writing. Of particular focus are Ibsen’s practical theatrical experiences in Bergen and Kristiania, and importantly his relationship to Gyldendal publishing house and its head, Frederik V. Hegel. Fulsås suggests Ibsen’s association with Gyldendal resulted in a shift of focus from performance to book culture and ensured an
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2022.2063980
Cristina Gómez-Baggethun, David Rodríguez-Solás, Sarah Wright
some texts people simply do not seem to be done one of is s An Enemy of the People the the play s quality it of most plays. In over a century of theatre and television productions of play, of democracies, the decadence of
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1997234
Klaus Müller-Wille
Kristin Gjesdal has already published a long series of articles and one anthology on the philosophical impact of Ibsen’s dramatic works. With the present volume she delivers a more comprehensive and more deeply analyzed study on the subject that focuses on Ibsen’s discussion of the philosophy of history. In the seven chapters of the study, she discusses Ibsen’s relation to the aesthetic writings of Lessing and Herder, she debates his ambivalent reactions towards Hegel’s aesthetics and philosophy of history, and finally she goes into the complex relation between the attempts by Ibsen and Nietzsche to revitalize modern forms of tragedy. One of the virtues of the study is that Gjesdal not only pays attention to this German context, but also to Scandinavian philosophers who transmitted and modified German philosophy (besides Kierkegaard and Brandes she repeatedly refers to Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s philosophical writings). One could, of course, say that all of these complex intertextual relations have already been treated in older studies by Harald Beyer, Ole Koppang, Asbjørn Aarseth, Thomas F. Van Laan, Brian Johnston, and Matthias Straßner (to name just a few important representatives). But Gjesdal is certainly right when she states that the focus of these studies has been “lighter on philosophical content and detail” (p. 8) and heavier on dramaturgical observations. This should not insinuate that she is blind for the literary dimensions of Ibsen’s works. On the contrary, all of the presented readings are characterized by an attempt to take drama and the dramatical forms of representation seriously. This
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Pub Date : 2021-12-09DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1997235
Sara Culeddu
Published by Marsilio in 2020 and equipped with a preface by Franco Perrelli, Trieste e il caso Ibsen. Polemiche e dibattiti tra Otto e Novecento (Trieste and the Ibsen case. Controversies and Debates at the Turn of the Twentieth Century) is a recent work by Paolo Quazzolo, Associate Professor of Drama Studies at the University of Trieste and author of many publications on theatre, both from a historical and critical point of view, as well as monographs on specific playwrights. This is his first book on Ibsen. In this work on Ibsen in Trieste the historical and critical approaches previously employed by Quazzolo seem to merge, enhancing each other to create new perspectives. Here the author reconstructs the first reception of Ibsen in Italy focussing on the encounter between the Norwegian playwright and the city of Trieste at the turn of the twentieth century, and recognises in this encounter some unique elements, charged with promises of mutual enrichment: on the one hand the reception of Ibsen in Trieste – once some initial scepticism was overcome – set the tone for the national reception of the playwright; on the other, the entrance of his dramas both on the stages and in cultural debates in Trieste during those years contributed to reconceptualizing the identity of a city which, in that moment, was defining its role and position in the cultural landscape of Italy. One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the narrowing of its focus to a very specific geographic area, which allows
Marsilio于2020年出版，并配有Franco Perrelli的序言，Trieste e il caso Ibsen。Polemiche e dibattti tra Otto e Novecento（的里雅斯特和易卜生案。二十世纪之交的争议和辩论）是的里雅特大学戏剧研究副教授Paolo Quazzolo的最新作品，他出版了许多关于戏剧的出版物，从历史和批判的角度来看，以及关于特定剧作家的专著。这是他的第一本关于易卜生的书。在这部关于的里雅斯特易卜生的作品中，Quazzolo之前采用的历史和批判方法似乎融合在一起，相互增强，创造了新的视角。在这里，作者以二十世纪之交挪威剧作家易卜生与的里雅斯特市的相遇为中心，重建了易卜生在意大利的第一次接受，并在这次相遇中认识到了一些独特的元素，充满了相互丰富的承诺：一方面，易卜生在的里雅斯特受到的欢迎——一旦一些最初的怀疑被克服——为全国对这位剧作家的欢迎定下了基调；另一方面，他的戏剧在的里雅斯特的舞台上和文化辩论中的出现，有助于重新定义一个城市的身份，在那一刻，这个城市正在定义它在意大利文化景观中的角色和地位。这本书最有趣的方面之一是将重点缩小到一个非常特定的地理区域，这使得
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Pub Date : 2021-11-24DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1997232
Kamaluddin Nilu
INTRODUCTION This article describes the process of developing NativePeer, a transcultural adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s text Peer Gynt that I made in 2015 within the post-colonial Indian context. The adaptation was part of an assignment to direct the play at the National School of Drama, New Delhi. However, this article is limited to reflections on and handling of approaches and challenges in the adaptation process. I intended to make a text that would communicate with present-day Indian readers and audiences. It required a deep-rooted process, far beyond merely a textual translation. The fundamental task was to negotiate the source text within the socio-political-cultural context of colonially mediated modernity, representing the juncture between tradition and modernity of contemporary India. This juncture is the meeting place between two different political visions for economic and social reform after partition in 1947: the Gandhian project of reviving the village economy, and the Nehruvian vision of prosperity through rapid industrialization as a part of a Western-inspired secular modernization project. This divide still characterizes the socio-political climate in India. Moreover, one could understand the present situation in India as part of a wider notion of colonialist interpellation, which is implanted within the postcolonial structure. As Partha Chatterjee argues in his book The Nation and Its Fragments:
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Pub Date : 2021-11-24DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1997233
Ana Tomljenović
If we place Hedda Gabler within a broad intertextual scope of Plato’s Symposium, as proposed by Kristin Boyce (2018) in her analysis, then Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf could be examined as a subsequent transcript of this famous philosophical dialogue on love. Little Eyolf might be viewed as an appendix or a sequel to Hedda Gabler, a piece stemming from the remains of its motif—as though it rose from the ashes in Hedda’s fireplace or sprang from the pieces of paper out of which Tesman and Thea hope to compile a new book in the final scene of the play. In Little Eyolf, the play Ibsen wrote four years after Hedda Gabler, he continues to evolve Plato’s metaphor of giving birth to a book like giving birth to a child. Little Eyolf is a play about a book that never managed to mature, about a child who never grew up, about people striving to grow fully as people. As in the play Hedda Gabler, in which missing books and unborn children forever remain shrouded by darkness—either hidden in their mother’s womb, trapped in the scholar’s head, or burnt in the black rectangle of a fireplace—in Little Eyolf the hypothesis remains unfinished and the child is lost. As noted by Ernst Robert Curtius in his study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “the concept of the book as a child [... ] goes back to Plato’s doctrine of Eros” (Curtius 2013, 132). In Plato’s Symposium—in the part where Socrates decides to convey what Diotima taught him about the subject of love—love is defined as “giving birth in the beautiful, in respect of body and
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1932045
Gerd Karin Omdal
This issue of Ibsen Studies presents two pieces of original research on Ibsen that respectively represent the predominant scholarly traditions within the field, close textual analysis and performance history. Yet both authors, who are both emerging scholars based in Norway, break new ground in their choice of subject material. In “The Mystic and Modernity: Unfolding Past and Present in Emperor and Galilean,” Gerd Karin Omdal draws attention to the character Maximus, who is both mystic and philosopher and thus seemingly at odds with the exploration of modernity that the play is known for. Picking up from previous readings of the play that rule out the possibility of an unambiguously Christian and/ or idealist interpretation, Omdal focuses her attention on the role played by Maximus in conceptualizing the so-called “third empire” that would synthesize opposing pre-Christian and Biblical world views into something new. Whereas other scholars have placed primary emphasis on the philosophical tradition connected to Maximus, Omdal turns her attention instead to Maximus as mystic, contextualizing him within Neoplatonic and occult traditions. She argues that a synthesized understanding that encompasses both the philosophical and the mystical components of the character is necessary. In this, Omdal reflects a growing trend within the field of Scandinavian studies that seeks to examine the nineteenth-century fascination with the occult as an influential cultural phenomenon of the era, without in any way reproducing or espousing its pseudo-scientific beliefs. This is a welcome contribution because it opens up aspects of the text that have been ignored, perhaps because of a certain academic squeamishness or unwillingness to take such matters seriously as influential (if clearly misguided) cultural developments.
本期《易卜生研究》提供了两篇关于易卜生的原创研究，分别代表了该领域的主要学术传统、密切的文本分析和表演史。然而，两位作者都是挪威的新兴学者，他们在主题材料的选择上开辟了新的天地。Gerd Karin Omdal在《神秘与现代性：在皇帝与伽利略中展现过去与现在》中提请人们注意马克西姆斯这个角色，他既是神秘主义者又是哲学家，因此似乎与该剧以探索现代性而闻名。根据之前对该剧的解读，奥姆达尔排除了明确的基督教和/或唯心主义解释的可能性，她将注意力集中在马克西姆斯在概念化所谓的“第三帝国”中所扮演的角色上，该帝国将把对立的前基督教和圣经世界观综合成新的东西。尽管其他学者主要强调与马克西姆斯有关的哲学传统，但奥姆达尔将注意力转向了马克西姆斯作为神秘主义者，将他置于新柏拉图主义和神秘主义传统的语境中。她认为，有必要综合理解人物的哲学和神秘成分。在这一点上，Omdal反映了斯堪的纳维亚研究领域的一种日益增长的趋势，即试图审视19世纪对神秘学的迷恋，将其视为当时一种有影响力的文化现象，而不以任何方式复制或支持其伪科学信仰。这是一个受欢迎的贡献，因为它揭示了文本中被忽视的方面，也许是因为某种学术上的拘谨或不愿认真对待这些有影响力（如果明显被误导的话）的文化发展。
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1924428
Elin Stengrundet
The main theme of Olivia Noble Gunn’s study is well summarized in its title: Empty Nurseries, Queer Occupants: Reproduction and the Future in Ibsen’s Late Plays. The empty nurseries that Gunn has found to occupy a conspicuous place in Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), and Little Eyolf (1894) are not filled with the parents’ children but with what she calls “improper occupants,” i.e., with “inhabitants that are not the children of the family” (16), and she sets out to demonstrate what this recurrent pattern may mean. As a starting point, her observation seems both refreshingly concrete and full of promise. Still, one wonders, at the outset, whether the nursery theme will yield enough material to fill an entire book, not least because, as Gunn herself points out, these empty rooms do not get much attention in the texts: “In a certain sense, Ibsen’s nurseries are little more than traces” (12), they are offstage, and they are “more or less peripheral to the action” (11). However, she maintains that it is precisely these “trace-like qualities” that make the rooms significant; the empty spaces are spaces of possibility and hence of the future (12). A study of this motif may therefore be able to put us on the trail of Ibsen’s thinking about “reproduction in its broad sense” (3). In addition, Gunn maintains that her examination will put her in dialogue with “some major claims from queer and critical child studies” (2). Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear what these claims imply. From the very start, the reader encounters the difficulty of not knowing exactly for whom the study is written. Its style is often
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Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/15021866.2021.1932046
Gianina Druță, O. Dubălaru, Ellen Karoline Gjervan
The dissertation of Gianina Druta investigates the early performance history of Henrik Ibsen in Romania between 1894 and 1947. It is also the first analysis within Romanian Ibsen scholarship and theatre history to combine digital humanities tools with a traditional theatre historiographical approach. In this respect, the use of the IbsenStage database and of histoire crois ee provides the methodological and theoretical framework of this study. The Romanian quantitative and qualitative data have revealed a contradiction: Ibsen was not performed with great frequency, yet historical sources suggest that he had a significant impact on national acting and staging practices. The dissertation embarks on an exploration of this contradiction. First, it analyzes the aesthetic diversity of influences brought into Romania by French, Italian, German, Hungarian and Yiddish touring performances. Second, it pinpoints commercialism, protectionism and aesthetics as the strongest forces of constraint within the unstable administrative, financial and legislative structures of the early Romanian theatre. Then, it assesses how these forces worked for and against the production of Ibsen’s plays. Third, the dissertation considers the impact of twelve Romanian Ibsenites in three production hubs: the National Theatre of Ias, i,
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