Ibsen's Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy

Ibsen's Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy argues that in his late plays Ibsen struggled with, and finally repudiated the Aristotelian ideas of reality and change that held sway over the earlier part of his career, and more generally over nineteenth century drama and culture. The first chapter analyzes Aristotle's Poetics, which centers on the classical relation of catharsis, rational agency, and intelligible change in human affairs. The second chapter presents Nietzsche's transformation of those topics into a modernist poetics and a modernist agenda for living. The rest of the book analyzes Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder, and relates Ibsen's formal, intellectual, and cultural innovations in these plays to Nietzsche's assault on the Aristotelian humanism that Victorian Europe valued so highly. Through his Nietzschean subversion of the popular forms of Victorian theatre - melodrama, problem, play, Magdalene play, professional intrigue, and remarriage plot - and the culture they represent, Ibsen struggled messianically to reveal how life could pass, heroically, from right action to tragic joy.

Author: Theoharis C. Theoharis
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Published: 05/12/1999
Pages: 310
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780312221492

About the Author
THEOHARIS C. THEOHARIS teaches at Harvard University and is editor of The Boston Book Review. He is the author of James Joyce's Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul.