Skip to product information
1 of 1

Oxford University Press, USA

The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre

The Nervous Stage: Nineteenth-Century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre

Regular price $85.94 USD
Regular price Sale price $85.94 USD
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Format
Nineteenth-century investigations into the nervous system produced extraordinary discoveries that changed ways of thinking far beyond the scientific community. Over the course of the century, scientists began to conceive of the subject not principally as soul, mind, or even brain, but instead
as a complex of organically interacting mechanisms, many of them operating more or less autonomously and unconsciously. Meanwhile, theatrical works of the time by Shelley, Wagner, Dickens, Buchner, Zola, and Strindberg, sought to play directly on the nerves of the spectators through
non-representational means, comprising a coherent genre Matthew Wilson Smith has dubbed the theaters of sensation.

The Nervous Stage examines the relations between theatrical practices and the scientific study of the nervous system, arguing that to a significant degree, modern theater emerged out of the interaction between these two apparently disparate fields. In six chapters, The Nervous Stage makes three
fundamental contributions to scholarship on comparative literature, specifically in the areas of drama/performance, cognitive literary studies, and the beginnings of global modernism. Through a series of revisionist readings of specific theatrical works and artists, Smith demonstrates that a number
of literary texts were deeply engaged in dialogue with the neurological sciences of their period, and that an appreciation of this dialogue helps us better to understand their significance for their own historical period as well as for our own. Furthermore, it argues that a number of lesser-known
works--ranging from certain closet dramas such as Shelley's The Cenci to popular melodramas such as Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight--had much greater cultural significance than has been acknowledged heretofore.


Author: Matthew Wilson Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 11/01/2017
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.20w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780190644086

Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2018

About the Author

Matthew Wilson Smith is Associate Professor of German Studies and Theater & Performance Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007) and the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works (Norton, 2011)

View full details