Abstract

This article investigates the current generation of Penguin Ibsen editions, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts and dating back to the 1950s and ‘60s. It sketches the development of Penguin’s publishing profile, and goes on to consider the role played by Penguin Classics in maintaining Ibsen as a central writer in the Western canon, and, with time, in world literature. By examining paratexts, materiality and translation strategies, the main part of the article considers how these editions construct their particular Ibsens. It looks, among other things, at the organisational principles and the scholarly apparatus. The article concludes by briefly noting some possible ambitions for, as well as challenges facing, a new generation of Penguin Ibsen editions.

Highlights

  • I Further archival work will perhaps throw light on the reasons why Ibsen was selected by Penguin Classics at such an early stage

  • While the decades that lie between first publication of these editions and our own day have seen a flood of new translations into English and numerous academic works that have helped reshape our views of Ibsen, Penguin have stuck faithfully to its old translations and its original paratexts, only putting on new covers

  • Summary This article investigates the current generation of Penguin Ibsen editions, translated by Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts and dating back to the 1950s and ‘60s

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Summary

Introduction

I Further archival work will perhaps throw light on the reasons why Ibsen was selected by Penguin Classics at such an early stage. I In any case, the choice of including Ibsen in this company, followed up with new volumes of Ibsen plays later in the same decade and in the can in hindsight be said to have helped secure his status in the English-language canon of classics, and to have prepared the way for his further dissemination within a circuit of world literature.

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