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Examines the centrality of Greek tragedy for modernist performance
This book explores how encounters between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy were constitutive in modernist experiments in performance. It analyses the experiments of Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D., and Bertolt Brecht in creating a modernist aesthetic in performing, dancing, translating, and designing Greek tragedies, sometimes for the stage and sometimes for the page. The book proposes a modernist aesthetic of Greek tragedy based on Hellenism as theatricality that radically revises the philosophical discourses of tragedy.
Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
List of contents
List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction: 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?'; 2. Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig and the Dream of an Impossible Theatre; 3. Poetic Drama: Theatricality, Performability and Translation; 4. H. D.: Feet, Hands and Hieroglyphs; 5. Epic, Tragic, Dramatic Theatre and the Brechtian Project; 6. Afterword: (No) More Masterpieces; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Olga Taxidou is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is author of
The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig (Routledge, 1998) and of
Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and co-editor of
Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) and of
Post-War Cinema and Modernism: A Film Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). She is co-editor with Vassiliki Kolocotroni of
The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pk, 2020) and with Vassiliki Kolocotroni and Jane Goldman,
Modernism: an Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh University Press, 1998, 2000).
