English Dramatic Modernism

Professor Tague is a co-editor of (and a contributor to) the volume; Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Professor of Drama at the University of Lincoln, U.K., is also an editor.  The book, which boasts fifteen new essays by modernist scholars from around the world, is fully indexed, including a comprehensive bibliography for each essay, and features illustrations of dramatic performances, old and new.  The work is a vital contribution to the study of and scholarship on the artistic shifts and cultural changes that bred the modernist movement, specifically pertaining to drama and theater.

The aim of this book is to focus on the dramatic works of the early period of modernism in England with an emphasis on origins: the artistic, stylistic, and intellectual development of some well-known and some less-known writers or actor-managers.  The volume serves as a companion to ORIGINS OF ENGLISH LITERARY MODERNISM, 1870-1914 (2009), edited by Professor Tague.  The book also handily serves as a companion to standard works on drama by Christopher Innes and J.L. Styan (both of whom are often invoked in the drama collection).  In fact, Tague and Dinkgräfe’s collection strives to include a broad mix of thought concerning modernism including, as well as attention to the history of ideas, literary and cultural developments.  These two books (almost 800 pages combined) on Modernism bring together 36 different modernist scholars (in 36 chapters) addressing many pressing concerns, themes, ideas, and trends in this growing field of study.

Here is a description of the contents of the drama book, drawing from the Introduction. 

· Kelly Jones and Ben Poore (together) provide a general overview of popular theatrical traditions (the freak show, the music hall, the circus) and their impact upon the theatre of the avant-garde, even as the avant-garde incorporated such popular traditions whilst segregating itself off from the popular.  

· Diane Dubois considers the role of women in the development of English dramatic modernism.  

· Felicia J. Ruff discusses the severed head in Wilde’s Salome asking whether there is a physical stage presence when the body is “erased.” 

· Frances Piper maps the tension, reflected in the drama of the fin-de-siècle, between the increasing importance of the “individual” in society and the desire to address the social realities of “the city poor” (in plays by, e.g., George R. Sims).  

· Timothy Carlos Matos and Patricia D. Denison (separately) write about Arthur Wing Pinero: Matos traces the relationship between Pinero and Ibsen, arguing that Ibsen’s influence on Pinero was the result, not necessarily of aesthetic imitation, but of a very distinctive critical conditioning; Denison broadens the perspective on Pinero further with reference to Shaw, providing a review of the history of Pinero’s reputation as a way of positioning earlier and current perspectives on the emergence of modernist aesthetics from Victorian and Edwardian theatrical contexts, and of rebalancing the era’s understanding of the relative merits of convention and innovation in theatrical production and social action.  

· Allan Pero focuses on the other one (besides Pinero) of the two most popular dramatists of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, Henry Arthur Jones.  

· The two chapters by Franc Chamberlain and Evanthia Katsouraki, move away from the analysis of dramatists and their plays to the discussion of the seminal theatre artist, Edward Gordon Craig, and the end of the actor-manager tradition so characteristic of Victorian times.  

· Nancy Watanabe’s contribution brings us back to the dramatists of the era, in this case J.M. Barrie, whom Watanabe places in the wider context of Japanese Noh theatre.  

· Gregory F. Tague argues for the consideration of D.H. Lawrence as a dramatist and one who, in two early plays, works in a symbolist strain, drawing from French nineteenth century traditions and in reaction to the modern emphasis on scientific materialism.  

· A number of essays refer to George Bernard Shaw in passing, while Miriam Chirico and Lance Norman’s contributions to the volume focus more exclusively on Shaw.  

· Jennifer Plastow examines the role of Frida Strindberg, who was trying to create herself as an impresario, as the nexus of a creative and theatrical movement in the pre World War I years.  

· Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, co-editor of the volume, finally, pulls together the threads created in the volume’s contributions, in the context of consciousness studies.

Table of Contents

 Illustrations

 Acknowledgements

 Introduction

Benjamin Poore and Kelly Jones, “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning of Its Own”: Crises of Category in English Theatre Cultures, 1890-1914

Diane Dubois, Out of the Parlour and into the Centre: Studying Women’s Contribution to English Modernist Theatre and Drama

Felicia J. Ruff, The Body in Fragment: Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Modernist Spectacle

Frances L. Piper, The City, the “self”, and the Paradox of Authenticity in George R Sims’ The Lights O’ London and John Galsworthy’s Justice

Timothy Carlo Matos, The Native Cure: Pinero, Ibsen and the Containment of Mrs. Tanqueray

Patricia D. Denison, Evolution, Revolution, and Dramatic Modernism in Arthur W. Pinero’s His House in Order

Allan Pero, “The Barest Fraction of Real Life”: Henry Arthur Jones, Anti-Realism, And the Scene of Truth

Franc Chamberlain, Craig and Early Modernism

Evanthia Kasouraki, Acting Transmutations: From Imitation to Interpretation

Nancy Watanabe, Barrie’s Meiji-Era London Plays and the East-West Modernism of Yeats and Eliot

Gregory F. Tague, Beyond Mimesis: Symbolism and Visual Perception from the Nineteenth Century in Early Plays of D.H. Lawrence

Miriam M. Chirico, Shaw, Wilde, Synge and the Trope of Lost Identity

Lance Norman, Prefacing Modernism:  Textual Didacticism and Theatrical Contextualization in the Drama of George Bernard Shaw

Jennifer Plastow, A Palace of All the Arts: Modernism, Shadows and Theatrics Among the Avant-Garde

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, The Origins of English Dramatic Modernism in the Context of Consciousness Studies

Notes on Contributors

Index