133 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textAgainst the background of the contentions and debate on the nation, national identity and national culture Van der Poll and Van der Zalm frame the concept of national plays by considering the characteristics of a national play and its different notions. As is shown in this chapter, the term is related to, but not identical to terms such as national theatre, ‘classic’ plays, and ‘state-of-the-nation’ plays—as defined in Nadine Holdsworth’s Theatre and Nation. Van der Poll and Van der Zalm demonstrate that, whereas the canonization of classic plays is part of a broader Western cultural process, the canonization of national plays is part of a particular national cultural discourse. A national play, and the stagings of that play, function on both representational and constructional levels, representing and constructing or deconstructing the nation and ideas about national identity. It is a discursive construct as well as what Bhabha defined as a performative narrative strategy, which circulates through society and by being repeatedly re-interpreted on stage can criticize, redefine or even create (new) national patterns of self-identification
Peer Gynt: Norway’s National Play
No full textThat a national play, explicitly or implicitly, can be critical of both national thought and identity is illustrated by Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867). Ibsen presented a selfish, opportunistic anti-hero in order to hold up a critical mirror for the advocates of the Norwegian nation. The play focuses on the people and folk culture and has an extensive performance history, which is meticulously analysed. Van der Poll shows that the early performance history of Peer Gynt turned the play into a bearer of nationalistic pathos and the glorifier of Norway and the Norwegians. Subsequent re-evaluation of the dramatic text in turn enabled the play and its performances to provide critical counter narratives and help stimulate discussion of what it means to be Norwegian
‘Something Out of the Way’: Edmund Gosse’s Biography of Henrik Ibsen
No full textIn 1907, Edmund Gosse published two biographies, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments and Henrik Ibsen. In her chapter on Edmund Gosse’s biography of Henrik Ibsen, Suze van der Poll examines how far we can say that Gosse’s Father and Son functions as a source of inspiration for Henrik Ibsen. Looking more closely at the structural principles of the work and Gosse’s presentation of temperament and his use of narrative techniques, she demonstrates that the English biographer’s portrait not only shapes Ibsen as a canonical European author and citizen of the world, but at the same time reflects Gosse’s own development, as both human being and literary critic
Epilogue
No full textOver a remarkably short period in the early twenty-first century, plays such as Peer Gynt in Norway and The Good Hope in the Netherlands came to be staged much more frequently than before, and as a cultural response to the riots in the Parisian banlieues a strongly modernized version of Tartuffe was performed in France. More or less simultaneously, in discussions apparently fuelled by debates on the nation and national identity in public political and cultural discourse, politicians in Norway and the Netherlands suddenly began to talk about the need for a national cultural canon to be added to school curricula
"Écrire la fable du réel". Les Belles Âmes de Lydie Salvayre comme poétique d'un nouveau réalisme
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Der Nationaldichter und die Kinematographie: Zur medialen Inszenierung von Holger Drachmanns persona wie Werk in dessen letzten Lebensjahren
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Hans Christian Andersen's Media Ecology: "The Old Church Bell" in Folkekalender for Danmark (1862)
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