Antisemitism in Modern Literature and Theater

This essay analyzes antisemitism in modern German literature from the Enlightenment to post-Holocaust times. It shows how antisemitic stereotypes and theological elements were encoded in fictitious stories and how Jews were portrayed as foreign and demonic by both left-wing and right-wing writers. Both sides fabricated claims that it was the Jews who were responsible for the shortcomings of all forms of modern society.

The chapter traces racialized constructions of 'the Jew' as figures of desire and abjection in English literature from Chaucer to Margaret Drabble.

Modern tiyatroda mask, oluş ile ilgili krizlerin örneklenmesinde kullanılmıştır. Tiyatroda benlik krizi, yüzü başkalaştıran, genel ifadede donduran mask aracılığıyla farklı amaçlarla, farklı yazarlar tarafından sıklıkla kullanılmıştır. Özneyi yeniden bütüncülleştirmeye çalışan bir çağda, çağdaş yazar somut veya soyut masktan ne ummuştur? Bilindiği gibi dramatik yazarlıkta bir kavram olarak karakter, modern özne biçimlerine derinden bağımlıdır. Aynı zamanda benliğin algısı ve benlik ile dünya arasındaki ilişkilerdeki değişikliğin bir tezahürünü kendinde oluşturmaktadır. Benliğin asal krizi yüz/maske kutuplaşmasına dayanır. Batı düşüncesinde maske, her zaman muhalefet anlamına gelir. Maske öznelliğin göstergesi olmasının tersine, eşsiz benlik, insan yüzü fikrinin son çaresidir. Maske, gerçek benlik yaratmanın imkânsızlığının bir işareti olsa da altta yatan bir melankoliye işaret eder. Maske ile belirgin yakınlıkları olan başka bir kavram ise metamorfoz kavramıdır. Kimlik kararsızdır, ancak metamorfoz onun hem kaybı hem de garantiye alınmış halidir. Metamorfoz anı, hem kendinden önce hem de sonraki anları içine alır. Paradoksal olarak, kimlik istikrarsızlaşırken bile kendisinin hayatta kalmasını sağlar. Bu çalışma Pirandello, Brecht, Genet ve Müller örnekleminde maske ve metamorfozun modern oyun yazınındaki yerini inceler

A little over 100 years ago, the first production of An-sky’s The Dybbuk, a play about the possession of a young woman by a dislocated spirit, opened in Warsaw. In the century that followed, The Dybbuk became a theatrical conduit for a wide range of discourses about Jews, belonging, and modernity. This timeless Yiddish play about spiritual possession beyond the grave would go on to exert a remarkable and unforgettable impact on modern theater, film, literature, music, and culture. The Dybbuk Century collects essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars who explore the play’s original Yiddish and Hebrew productions and offer critical reflections on the play’s enduring influence. The collection will appeal to scholars, students, and theater practitioners, as well as general readers.

While August Strindberg’s crucial influence on the development of modern drama is widely acknowledged, little is known outside Sweden, his native country, about his life-long pursuit of painting, photography, and the natural sciences and how these interests, in turn, fed into his work as a playwright. In the English-speaking world such limited familiarity with the scope of Strindberg’s work and interests might be attributed to the scarcity of translations of his non-literary writings.1 But to an even larger extent, Strindberg’s public image has been informed by the focus and attitudes of literary history and of Strindberg-studies that until recently tended to dismiss the playwright’s pursuit of non-literary activities as insignificant digression. The currently emerging criticism, however, keeps shedding new light on his contributions to literary and theatrical modernism by placing his work within a wider cultural and interdisciplinary context.2

Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe was established in 2018 by Esther Fernández, Jonathan Wade, Jared White, and Jason Yancey. A staging of The Fabulous Johnny Frog at the 2018 Association for Hispanic and  Classical  Theater’s  (AHCT)  yearly  symposium  marked  their  beginning  as  a  troupe.  This  work,  adapted by Yancey, focuses on the controversial Juan Rana character and was designed as an outreach initiative to bring early modern Spanish theater to schools using shadow puppetry. In 2019, Dragoncillo created a new performance for the Siglo de Oro Drama Festival and their community partners based on two entremeses written by Francisco de Quevedo. This essay details the formation of Dragoncillo Puppet Troupe and its early efforts to introduce early modern Hispanic literature and culture to various audiences across the United States. Furthermore, the essay reflects the process by which shows are conceived and staged and how those performances evolve over time. Finally, it imagines an expanded repertoire for the troupe that extends beyond the longstanding tradition of puppet theater in Spain to include other texts and contexts from Iberia and Latin America. 

In modern philosophy, theology, literature, theatre and film, there is a distinct inclination to complain vociferously about the silence of God in the face of horrendous crimes and disasters. Matthijs de Jong introduces an unwarranted restriction of the theme by equating the speaking of deities with divine favour and silence with divine disfavour. Bob Becking sees Ezra and Nehemiah as symbolic, aniconic representations of God's return to the temple on Zion. It applies to God's reinstated presence, but not to his silence or speech. Joel Burnett explores personal names as expressions of personal piety, relying heavily on the pioneering work of Rainer Albertz. More parallels between ancient Israel and its Eastern neighbours are being discovered. God has chosen to reveal himself in a specific historical situation, just as one lives in a situation. It is made clear that the silence of God was vexing people all over the world. Keywords: Bob Becking; Ezra; Israel; Joel Burnett; Matthijs de Jong; Nehemiah; silence of God

For a considerable period of time, literary Modernism has been mainly associated with the study of the novel and poetry rather than drama perhaps due to New Criticism’s emphasis on the text and disregard of performance. This profound anti-theatrical thrust of Modernism has to be, most certainly, re-examined and reassessed, particularly within the context of Australian literature and, more specifically, Australian theatre. That Australian modernist theatre has been inconspicuous on the world stage seems to be an obvious and undisputable statement of facts. Yet, with Patrick White, English-born but Australian-bred 1976 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Australian low-brow uneasy mix of British vaudevilles, farces and Shakespeare, mingled with the local stories of bushranging and convictism, got to a new start. Patrick White’s literary output is immense and impressive, particularly in regards to his widely acclaimed and renowned novels; yet, as it seems, his contribution to Australian – least the world – drama is virtually unknown, especially in Europe. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to disclose those modernist elements in Patrick White’s play, The Ham Funeral, that would argue for the playwright to be counted as one of the world avant-garde modernist dramatists alongside Beckett and Ionesco.

In an attempt to comprehend the notion of Grotesque, this study examines the evolution of one of the most polymorphic, elusive and evolving aesthetic categories in Art and Literature at two moments of its history: its emergence as a critical term in the Arts; and its crucial reappearance in modern age. Indeed, those eras continue to prove challenging. The study of the early stages recieve considerable attention in this critique. Yet, the only conclusion that can be drawn from this is the lack of critical consensus on key points such as: What is the Grotesque; When did it appear or where did it emerge? Those ongoing controversies point out an unprecedented difficulty to define this aesthetic category which might have resulted in its success and longevity over the centuries. Modern literature constitutes another challenging era when dealing with the Grotesque because, if twentieth century literature provides prolific examples of this aesthetic category, very few critics commented on it. The thesis addresses, through a diachronic and trans-historical approach, the construction of the Grotesque in the Arts, Literature and Criticism, as well as grotesque manifestations in four well-known modern plays from Luigi Pirandello, Armando Discépolo, Roberto Cossa and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In this way, this study first explores the edification of the aesthetic category and engages with traditional assumptions. This is underpinned by a theoretical framework which addresses various theories and provide further evidence that grotesque expressions might have appeared before the first century B.C.E and that the artistic form found in Nero’s Domus Aurea, traditionally conceived as the emergence of the Grotesque, belonged to another genre. Secondly, the study highlights the richness and diversity of grotesque expressions in modern theater and aims at identifying recurring themes and strategies. By attempting to define it through its main characteristics –longevity and mutation over centuries–, our final analysis suggests that the Grotesque, as an aesthetic category, is an invention of the Renaissance, and serves, first and foremost, to depict a distressing experience of change.

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of other kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

Women Warriors in Early Modern Spain: A Tribute to Bábara Mujica

Brings together diverse scholarship on theatre and conversional practices in early modern Europe and Latin America Makes a compelling argument for the importance of theatrical practices and theatrical thinking in how conversion itself changed for early moderns Discusses a wide range of theatrical practices that include, but are not limited to, established canonical authors Provides new readings of classic plays by Middleton, Lope de Vega, and others Provides a series of case studies of theatre and conversional practice centered around specific cities This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theater that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.

Harrison Ainsworth’s Lancashire with “the castled heights of Clitheroe, the woody eminences of Bowland, the bleak ridges of Thornley, the broad moors of Bleasdale, the Trough of Bolland, and Wolf Crag … the entrance of the gloomy mountain gorge, known as the Grange of Cliviger,” possesses a brooding air.1 It seems only fitting that it is this region, alongside Essex, which has the dubious honor of holding the title “Witch County.” Over a century, Lancashire hosted two major witch trials and the same number of alleged dispossessions; these incidents would be the subject of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century pamphlets, and a theatrical production. Examining the material as a whole is revealing about the evolution of the portrayal of the supernatural in historical and literary source documents. Just as one can read modern literary and dramatic representations of witchcraft, such as The Crucible and Wicked, as social and political commentaries, the same is true of their predecessors. Each venture featuring Lancashire’s witches discussed below both reflects and contributes to the social, political, and religious discourse of the era. In this article, I will argue that these allegedly supernatural episodes were manipulated to comment upon contemporary issues: religious tenets were disseminated, monarchical policies confirmed and criticized, and popular culture vilified.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. Drawing on a range of materials, from prose to theatre, theological controversy to legal trials, and court ceremonies - including royal birthing rituals - Lander Johnson unearths previously unrecognised opinions about chastity. She reveals that early Stuart theatrical and court ceremonies were part of the same political debate as prose pamphlets and religious sermons. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

Bryan Reynolds's fascinating book, Becoming Criminal, contributes to the growing scholarly work that examines relations among early modern literature, theatre, and legalism. Reynolds identifies a distinct late sixteenth-century criminal culture that operated according to its own aesthetic, ideology, language, and lifestyle. This culture's proximity to state official culture was a crucial part of its own identity and also of its power to undermine and dissent from that official cultural identity. “Self-defined by the criminal conduct and dissident thought” of its members, and “officially defined by and against the dominant preconceptions of English cultural normality,” this culture “constituted a subnation that illegitimately occupied material and conceptual space within the English nation” (1). In this view, it sought not to destroy the dominant system but to feed off of it, possessing in itself a paradoxical coherence and chosen way of life that “transverses” official culture: that lies athwart of it, crosses into it, and is fetishized by it.