Artistic Parallels Research Articles

The Byronic Berlioz: Harold en Italie and Beyond

This reexamination of the issue of Byronism in the works of Berlioz begins by exploring previously overlooked connections between Berlioz's Harold en Italie and Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Byron's technique of Romantic irony is shown to be operative on many levels in Berlioz's symphony, especially as a tool for the projection of an image of the self in an autobiographical work. Berlioz's fascination with aspects of Byron's personality and literary technique also resulted in artistic parallels that permeate many other of his works that have never previously been identified as “Byronic”; especially noteworthy in this regard is the possible modeling of the end of Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust on Byron's Manfred, both of them works that deal autobiographically with the subject of guilt.

August Strindberg's A Dream Play: Day‐marks for a Journey in the Clouds

This paper explores the scientific background and artistic parallels to Strindberg's reworking of the life‐as‐dream motif in A Dream Play. It examines the connection between sky and dream in this play in the light of the new representations of the sky in Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Strindberg's own celestographs. It shows that the intuitive, romantic association between dream and sky, tested at the time Strindberg took his stunning experimental celestographs (without a camera or a lens) in 1893–94, is both used and challenged as a convention in this play. Special attention is devoted to clouds, as staple stage contraption reinterpreted by the play‐wright through his acquaintance with the writings of Camille Flammarion. This paper eventually suggests a new interpretation of the addition of the prologue witnessing Indra's Daughter's descent from Heaven to Earth.

Evreinov and Pirandello: Two Theatricalists in Search of The Chief Thing

The name Evreinov appears in the footnotes to a number of monographs on the better known Pirandello. Indeed, the artistic parallels between these two contemporaries have been frequently, if superficially, recognized in separate studies of both. I have sought elsewhere to develop the framework for a comparative analysis, focusing upon a common instinct for ‘theatricality’ and a snared obsession for putting theory into practice. This second and concluding study examines in closer detail the aesthetic and philosophical affinities between Evreinov and Pirandello in the context of their ‘theatre-in-thetheatre’ trilogies; it begins by identifying the formal properties of Evreinov's plays and goes on to consider the parallels and convergences with Pirandello's ideas.