Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance

Hellenism as Theatricality

Olga Taxidou (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

208 Seiten

2021
Edinburgh University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4744-1556-9 (ISBN)

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This book examines the ways the encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in the modernist experiments in performance. Through a series of events / instances / poses that engage visual, literary and performing arts, the modernist love/hate relationship with classical Greek tragedy is read as contributing to a modernist notion of theatricality, one that follows a double motion, revising both our understanding of Greek tragedy and of modernism itself. Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D, and Bertolt Brecht and their various, sometimes successful sometimes failed experiments in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating, designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page, are presented as radical experiments in and gestures towards the autonomy of performance. In the process the artists of the theatre themselves – the actor, the designer, the director, the playwright – are reconfigured and given a lineage and genealogy, through this modernist revision of tragedy and the tragic not as as a philosophical or philological tradition, but as a performance practice.

Olga Taxidou is Professor Emerita of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor at New York University. She is the author of The Mask: a Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (1998, 2001), Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (2004), Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (2007) and Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance: Hellenism as Theatricality (2021). She is co-editor of Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1998), Post-War Cinema and Modernity: a Film Reader (2000) and The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (2018).

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements

Introduction: ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’
Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig and the Dream of an Impossible Theatre
Poetic Drama: Theatricality, Performability and Translation
H. D.: Feet, Hands and Hieroglyphs
Epic, Tragic, Dramatic Theatre and the Brechtian Project
Afterword: (No) More Masterpieces

BibliographyIndex

Erscheinungsdatum	06.04.2021
Reihe/Serie	Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance
Zusatzinfo	6 black and white illustrations
Verlagsort	Edinburgh
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	464 g
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Dramatik / Theater
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-4744-1556-3 / 1474415563
ISBN-13	978-1-4744-1556-9 / 9781474415569
Zustand	Neuware