Nature's Dream Play: Modes of Vision and August Strindberg's Re-Definition of the Theatre

Abstract

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