Henrik Ibsen (1[zasłonięte]828-19) 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. |
|