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Shaw’s Ibsen

A Re-Appraisal

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

Authors:
  1. Joan Templeton

    1. New York, USA

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  • Argues that Shaw was a masterful reader of Ibsen's plays
  • Examines Ibsen’s primordial importance in Shaw’s brilliant but neglected dramatic criticism
  • Challenges the popular notion that Shaw used Ibsen to promote his own world view

Part of the book series: Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries (BSC)

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Table of contents (4 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. The Road to the Quintessence

    • Joan Templeton
    Pages 1-52

  3. The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891

    • Joan Templeton
    Pages 53-150

  4. The Ibsenite in the Theatre, 1892-1898

    • Joan Templeton
    Pages 151-252

  5. The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen, 1913

    • Joan Templeton
    Pages 253-319

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 321-359
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Keywords

About this book

This book argues that Shaw was a masterful reader of Ibsen's plays both as texts and as the cornerstone of the modern theatre. Dismantling the notion that Shaw distorted Ibsen to promote his own view of the world, and establishing Shaw’s initial interest in Ibsen as the poet of Peer Gynt, it chronicles Shaw’s important role in the London Ibsen campaign and exposes the falsity of the tradition that Shaw branded Ibsen as a socialist. Further, this study shows that Shaw’s famous but maligned The Quintessence of Ibsenism reflects Ibsen’s own anti-idealist notion of his work and argues that Shaw’s readings of Ibsen’s plays are pioneering analyses that anticipate later criticism. It offers new readings of Shaw’s “Ibsenist” plays as well as a comprehensive account of Ibsen’s importance for Shaw’s dramatic criticism, from his early journalism to Our Theatres of the Nineties, both as a weapon against the inanities of the Victorian stage and asthe standard bearer for modernism.

Reviews

“It is a powerful book, worthy of a prize.” (R. F. Dietrich, SHAW  The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 39 (1), 2019)

“Templeton (emer., Long Island Univ.) is an excellent writer and a distinguished thinker. She is also among the foremost experts on Ibsen and an astute interpreter of Shaw. … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.” (H. I. Einsohn, Choice, Vol. 53 (03), November, 2018)​

Authors and Affiliations

  • New York, USA

    Joan Templeton

About the author

Joan Templeton is Professor Emerita of Long Island University, USA, past President of the Ibsen Society of America and the International Ibsen Committee, and has taught at the universities of Paris-Sorbonne, Tours, and Limoges. Her work includes the books Ibsen's Women and Munch’s Ibsen: A Painter’s Visions of a Playwright and twenty-five articles in journals, including PMLA, Modern Drama, Scandinavian Studies, and Ibsen Studies.

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