Greek Tragedy and Modernist Performance

The book explores how modernist theatre makers' encounters with Greek tragedy influenced their experiments in performance, challenging traditional notions of tragedy and modernism. Artists like Duncan, Gordon Craig, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, H. D., and Brecht created radical experiments in creating a modernist aesthetic, reconfiguring the roles of actors, designers, directors, and playwrights.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 30 June 2021
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The book explores the interactions between modernist theatre makers and Greek tragedy, highlighting how these encounters shaped modernist experiments in performance. Through a series of events, instances, and poses that engage visual, literary, and performing arts, the modernist love-hate relationship with classical Greek tragedy is examined as contributing to a modernist notion of theatricality. The artists of the theatre, including Isadora Duncan, Edward Gordon Craig, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, H. D., and Bertolt Brecht, are presented as radical experiments in and gestures towards the autonomy of performance. This modernist revision of tragedy and the tragic not as a philosophical or philological tradition but as a performance practice reconfigures the artists of the theatre, giving them a lineage and genealogy.

Weight: 464g
Dimension: 161 x 240 x 20 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474415569