Preface

With this issue of Ibsen Studies, we get back to basics, as it were, publishing two articles that each in their own way reconsider what we think we already know about Ibsen’s reception and about A Doll’s House respectively. In “Networks, Asymmetries and Appropriations: Toward a Typology,” Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem consolidate the major patterns in Ibsen’s European reception history. They identify four differing strategies for how Ibsen gained access to theatre and book markets outside of Scandinavia. Fulsås and Rem first give an account of the playwright’s own early attempts to gain access to the German market—what they call “self-initiated mediation”—, noting how quickly he lost control over the fate of his own work. They go on to explain the pattern of “imperial appropriation” in which France and Britain in particular appropriated Ibsen’s works “In ways which ultimately served to reaffirm the centrality of their own, hegemonic literature and culture” (pp. 65–87). In particular the English theatre critic Edmund Gosse actively campaigned to promote Ibsen as a means to strengthening his own status in the literary field. Fulsås and Rem label the third pattern they identify “radical appropriation,” explaining how Ibsen’s works were adapted and harnessed to serve a specific ideology. The most striking cases in this category are the reconceptualization of Ibsen as a socialist thinker, the appropriation of Ibsen for the feminist cause, and the French association of Ibsen with the avant garde theatre. Finally, Fulsås and Rem identify a pattern concerned with “faithful” appropriations of Ibsen, or, in other words, translations and adaptations of the plays that sought to be mindful of their original language and cultural context. Translator William Archer and the actresses Janet Achurch and Elizabeth Robins serve as the model for this pattern. Fulsås and Rem see these patterns as useful in identifying how literature is disseminated, and their article