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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. W.B. Yeats: Theatre and Shakespearean Elitism
2. Ezra Pound: Theatre and Anti-Semitism
3. D.H. Lawrence: Theatre and the Working Class
4. James Joyce: Theatre and Sexual/Gender Non-Conformity
5. T.S. Eliot: Theatre and Popularity
6. Virginia Woolf: Theatre and Gender Equality
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
James Moran is Head of Drama in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. His research is primarily concerned with modern anglophone literature, with a particular interest in the theatre of twentieth-century Ireland. One of the main strands of his research explores how revolutionary politics and dramatic literature interact. He is the author of Modernists and the Theatre (Methuen Drama, 2022), The Theatre of D.H. Lawrence (Methuen Drama, 2015) and The Theatre of Sean O'Casey (Methuen Drama, 2013). He has also edited a volume of plays by political radicals such as Thomas MacDonagh and James Connolly (Four Irish Rebel Plays, 2007).
Summary
Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B. Yeats’s earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound’s onstage acting, the links between James Joyce’s and D.H. Lawrence’s sense of drama, T.S. Eliot’s thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of Virginia Woolf’s small-scale theatrical experimentation.
While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form. While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining communities of Lawrence’s plays, the sexually unconventional and non-binary gender expressions of Joyce’s fiction, and the female experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of theatrical performance.
These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts, but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures in literary history.
Foreword
James Moran explores the theatrical works and connections of key high-modernist writers, and reveals how their dramatic concerns lay at the heart of their broader literary lives.
