Lyrical Drama Research Articles

Pyramus and Thisbe or Romeo and Juliet? Literary sources and transformations of the myth about youthful love – from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the lyrical drama by Frederick Delius

The legend of Pyramus and Thisbe is one of those myths that have inspired creators for thousands of years, undergoing new and new metamorphoses. The story is specific in such a way that, thanks to Shakespeare’s genius, one of the versions has become dominant – that is, the story of Romeo and Juliet. What is interesting, even the fact that Shakespeare himself included the original theme of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in his play A Midsummer Night’s Dream did not change this situation. In Western culture, the sory of a boy and a girl who committed suicide (as a result of a misunderstanding and an unfortunate coincidence due to the fact that because of their family situation they had no chance for a life together) has been invariably and primarily linked to the names of Romeo and Juliet, and not Pyramus and Thisbe. However, in works by opera composers as well as in literature and other areas of art, the original names of the characters from one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses have never disappeared. The present article lists numerous operas, literary works and other works of art based on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. It devotes a special attention to the lyrical drama by Frederick Delius entitled A Village Romeo and Juliet, inspired by the short story by Gottfried Keller created in the trend poetic realism. The story, which is another instalment of the ancient legend, was inspired by real events of 1847. Hence, in the work, realistic themes are combined with the elements of the ancient myth. Keller’s literary work was clothed by Delius in oneiric theatrical and musical robes, in which it is not difficult to find the means of expression that were very fashionable at the turn of the 20th century. The interesting fact is that the title of the drama includes a reference to the characters from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and not to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, even though direct analogies with the legend of Pryamus and Thisbe are very clear. This is another proof how much the awareness of European people is dominated by one of the versions of the discussed myth, displacing the ancient story described by Ovid.

Blok – the Poet of Russian Counter-revolution

In the article the author examines the early creative works of A.A. Blok in the context of his political views which for a long time were clearly right-wing, conservative and even counter-revolutionary. The author quotes the opinions of many well-known Blok scholars who state that even in the years of 1905 – 1907 Blok was not ready to fully resign his ideals of autocracy and his reaction to the fi rst Russian revolution as really mixed. The author also claims that Blok’s poetic myth of the early years was based on the assumption that it was possible to revive the Petersburg empire, to inspire renewed force illuminating it with dawn light and waling it from hibernation. The author notes that the image of “dawn” in Blok’s poetry has much in common with the symbol of “returning ships”. On the basis of the analysis of a number of Bloc’s texts, the author comes to the conclusion that the “retuning ships” for Blok included also the Baltic squadron that sailed to the coast of Japan and perished in May of 1905 in the battle of Tsushima. This hypothesis lets the author to conclude that the poet, as well as many St. Petersburg intellectual class representatives, including Blok’s father-in-law D.I. Mendeleev, hoped that the empire could be revived by the turn to the East of those days, that the new reign would open for Russia the vast areas of Asia and revive the power of Peter’s state. The feeling of disaster that overcame St. Petersburg over the news of the squadron defeat at Tsushima was refl ected in Blok’s lyrical drama “King in the Square”, where the poet still chose the side of the dying myth of the autocracy in its opposition to the revolutionary masses.

Estreno absoluto: Concert Version of Felipe Pedrell’s La Celestina (1902) in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela (2022)

<i>Estreno absoluto</i>: Concert Version of Felipe Pedrell’s <i>La Celestina</i> (1902) in Madrid’s Teatro de la Zarzuela (2022)

"The passion-flower at the gate": Tennyson's Poetry in the "Annals" of Julia Margaret Cameron

"The passion-flower at the gate":Tennyson's Poetry in the "Annals" of Julia Margaret Cameron Michele Martinez (bio) Whereas the title "Annals of My Glass House" might suggest a multivolume history of an artist, the text is a twenty-seven-hundred-word essay by the celebrated Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. "Annals" was written in 1874 and published in Mrs. Cameron's Photography, an 1889 London exhibition catalog that accompanied the Camera Gallery's show.1 Since the text's republication in the July 1927 issue of the Photographic Journal, the essay has been reproduced numerous times for its pithy outline of Cameron's ten-year career as a photographer and the author's heartfelt statements about her sitters, which included members of her immediate and extended family, Britain's cultural and political elite, selected local island models, and at least one presumptuous fan. Although Cameron's portraits of Alfred Tennyson, her Freshwater neighbor, frequent model, and book illustration collaborator, have been the subject of much scholarship, no critic has commented on Cameron's use of quotations from Tennyson's poetry in the text. On the surface, "Annals" affirms the bond between Poetry and Photography by means of her friendship and collaboration with the poet laureate. More subtly, Cameron's quotations address the condescension of her critics by challenging them with an authoritative position that is voiced in Tennyson's dramatic lyrics. I argue that Cameron employs quotations from "The Gardener's Daughter," Maud, and "Locksley Hall" to exert an "imperialist visuality," which is expressed by poetic speakers whose gazes cast their subjects as English heroic or Orientalized types.2 Tennyson's male characters offer Cameron an aesthetic vision shaped by competition, conflict, and obsession, torrents of feeling that create a jarring dissonance in her narrative but flow seamlessly into a Carlylean form of "visualized authority in the Hero" and the photographer-critics' representations of photography as acts of domination and mastery (Mirzoeff, p. 13). [End Page 631] My argument builds on the work of Jeff Rosen, Joanne Lukitsh, and Lori Cavagnaro, who have powerfully demonstrated that Cameron's colonial origins and interests reflect a mode of seeing allied with defenders of English imperialism.3 Cameron's artistic collaborations with Tennyson emerged from a friendship based first in London and then transferred to the Isle of Wight, a prosperous English Channel island, where Queen Victoria and other wealthy English families owned vacation homes.4 In 1860, while Julia Margaret's husband, Charles Cameron, and their two eldest sons traveled to Ceylon to survey their family's coffee and rubber plantations, Julia Margaret purchased "two cottages on the adjacent property" to Tennyson's in the village of Freshwater.5 "Annals of My Glass-House" celebrates the friends, workers, and family gathered together by a benevolent matriarch over the years. However, quotations from Tennyson's poetry challenge the stable gendering of that voice and vision and register the camera's role as an agent of "coloniality."6 Marion Shaw, Robin Inboden, Matthew Reynolds, Emily A. Haddad, and Marion Sherwood have explored the poet laureate's mythic constructions of Englishness and the Orient, informed not by travel abroad but by literary mediation, especially imitations of and translations from Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian literature.7 In a move that Edward Said would call an act of imaginative geography, lines from Tennyson's 1873 encomium "To the Queen" encompass his vision of an "ever-broadening England, and her throne / In our vast Orient" (ll. 30–31).8 Composed in 1874, "Annals" creates a domesticated version of imperial territoriality that arises from Cameron's occupation of "colonial spaces" within Little Holland House, London, and Dimbola Lodge, the Isle of Wight.9 As Cameron narrates her photographic career in these domiciles, Tennyson's poetry reproduces a desiring, possessive gaze toward her subjects that, in photographic discourse, reflects technical mastery but also midcentury imperial authority.10 Cameron's transformation of husbandry spaces into a photography studio and a darkroom and her enlistment of family, neighbors, and visitors as models provide ample grounds for recognizing maternal and domestic sentiment in "Annals."11 Cameron's gendered spectrum of feeling and emotion erupts and relates to a long history of...

INTONATION STRUCTURE OF DONIZETT’S GAETANO OPERA (based on the example «Anne Bolena»)

The article is devoted to the operatic work of Gaetano Donizetti, the intonational features of which are considered on the example of one of the composer’s earliest operas «Anna Bolenа». It is an example not only of the author’s first success in this genre, but also of a successful combination of an expressive melody with dramatic content, as well as the author’s individual melodic writing of G. Donizetta in the 1830s along with «Maria Stewart», «Lucrezia Borgia», «Lucia di Lammermoor». Іn article methods are applied historiographic, genre-style methods and the method of intonational analysis. It is established that the specificity of the composer’s melodic style is the strengthening of the role of speech intonation, its growing into the thematics of both cantilena and virtuoso constructions, as well as the frequent use of recitative and ariose cues, due to which a natural transition from one emotion to another is created, which is extremely important. for the genre of lyrical drama.

Old Anew: Hellas

ABSTRACT Written in autumn 1821 and in print by April 1822, Hellas is the last work that Shelley published in his lifetime. It was suggested by the Greek War of Independence, which Shelley considered to be one of the great political events of his time: his preface links it to the revolutions in Spain, France, and Italy and closes with an assertion that Liberty is about to return to Europe. But despite Shelley’s ambitions, Hellas is a failure. Rather than being regarded as the crowning achievement of Shelley’s mature poetry, it is eclipsed by his occasional and fragmentary poems of 1822. This essay suggests that the problem with Hellas is that Shelley has chosen the wrong cause to sympathize with. From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, the most urgent political developments in the Romantic period concern the transatlantic slave trade and European colonial expansion across the world—all of which form the building blocks of today’s global capitalism. Shelley’s Hellenistic focus distracts him from what the future would come to regard as the defining events of his era. Nonetheless, the lyrical drama can further our attempts to reckon with the legacy of the past in our present.

Between Nationalism, Exoticism, and Social Distinction: The Spanish Lyric Drama in the 19th Century

AbstractAttempts to create a national opera in Spain repeatedly failed throughout the 19th century. Some authors have attributed this phenomenon to a deficit in the nationalization process. Others, to the contrary, have proved that there was a strong sense of Spanish national musicality from the middle of the 19th century onward. This article tries to explain this paradox underlining some essential elements that are not always attended by specialists: the importance of transnational, social, and economic dynamics that interfered in the process of the cultural construction of modern national identities. The projects of the Spanish nationalist intellectuals of the 19th century in relation to the definition of a national music were marked by the Romantic construction of Spanish musical exoticism, the new industry of entertainment, the existential situation of Spanish musicians, the formation of new artistic and musical fields, and the appearance of new forms of social distinction in the aftermath of the Spanish Liberal Revolution of the 1830s.

London Voices, 1820-1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford

Reviewed by: London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories ed. by Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford William Weber (bio) London Voices, 1820–1840: Vocal Performers, Practices, Histories, edited by Roger Parker, and Susan Rutherford; pp. 293. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $65.00, $64.99 ebook. Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford designed this volume to lay out "the multitudinous voices that were heard in countless contexts and venues" in the city of London during "two tumultuous, disorientating decades in the first half of the nineteenth century." They state that these were years where "the city's population expansion was at a height, and when, as a result, different classes were placed in dangerous but—at least to later eyes—culturally fruitful proximity" (2). The thirteen chapters variously trace how movements developed around ballad singers, opera stars, vocal improvisers, French actors, choruses of sacred music, and invented voice boxes, and how these movements expanded the range of London's musical culture between about 1820 and 1840. In the process, the [End Page 128] differences between so-called high and low areas of cultural activity were considerably polarized. What emerges is a fascinating array of disparate cultural institutions whose dynamism and wide social outreach had no parallel in that period. The contributors dig deep into particular contexts to display, in intriguing detail, how Londoners of various social levels experienced developments different from those spreading early in the nineteenth century. The introduction nonetheless warns us that "there was an anxiety that somehow, despite the expansion of London's venues and audiences, the city was being written out of accounts of musical prowess" (6). Claudio Vellutini lays out a contextual framework for understanding the social structure of institutions and practices within the world of Italian opera in the period. The King's Theatre, the premier opera house in London since 1704, had presented only opera troupes brought from Italy, but by the 1830s British singers were competing on a par with their Italian colleagues, developing their own supposedly English vocal style. With that change came the commodification of sheet music, permitting a vast public to perform pieces from their favorite operas in their homes. Vellutini argues that such commercial activity was "consistent with the consolidation of the logic of capitalism [that] emerged as a trope on both sides of the Atlantic" (64). For some observers, Italian opera thereby became justified only as long as it assisted in the reshaping of opera in English terms. The chapter by Cormac Newark lays out a conceptual basis for understanding the fundamental reshaping of English opera life. He provides a detailed analysis of comments made in The Opera: A Novel, a book by Catherine Gore published in 1832. Mrs. Gore, as she was always addressed, presented bold new perspectives about the English adaptation of Italian opera, treating opera as a useful microcosm for analyzing the "celebrity-spotting" central to amateur fascination with opera stars. Her book provided a broad array of commentary about the cultural life of the upper classes that grew out of the widespread social commentary that arose during that period. Accordingly, Newark argues, Gore dissected the "vicissitudes" she found in private discussions of the taste for opera that reached a climax in the fervent apotheosis of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the 1840s (253). In effect, Gore brought a bourgeois discernment by defining such taste as separate from the dilettantism that traditionally underlay taste for Italian opera. The concept of "voices" emerges in this volume's analysis of new kinds of cultural discourse within the discordant opinions presented in the press. Singers took on roles as "voices" and thereby articulated radically different roles compared with the ritualized discourse about opera in the eighteenth century. Operas thereby reconceived cultural assumptions long idolized for the unadventurous assumptions of the aristocratic public. Matildie Thom Wium thereby analyzes the "mythology" surrounding the prima donna's assumption of an exotic, in some respects negative, posture (122). That posture made the idolized singer out to be a "divine monster," thereby giving lyric drama a more formidable character compared with the exotically Italianized picture found in the eighteenth century (123). Likewise, Mary Ann Smart shows how adventurous new stagings could become...

Лермонтовские цитаты и реминисценции в антинигилистическом романе Н. С. Лескова «Некуда»

The paper deals with quotes and reminiscences from Lermontov’s works in the novel “Nowhere” by Leskov. The Lermontov’s text is used to express the author’s assessment and in the internal and external monologues of the nihilists of the “pure race” following the “theories” of nihilism. They tend not to delve into the contradictions of this phenomenon, therefore finding themselves in conflict with tradition. Lermontov’s reminiscences add lyrical drama to the characters’ conflict with society and their social protest. They help the author relate the theme of nihilism to the high themes and motives of Russian literature. As Leskov considers Lermontov’s poetry an example of skepticism and rebellion of the gifted man against authority, he shows the connection of the nihilism of his time with the complex of rebellious and demonic worldview characteristic of Lermontov’s lyrical hero and Pechorin. Lermontov’s motifs in the novel elevate the images of “pure nihilists” above the socio-pragmatic tasks of their plan. The personality traits of Lisa Bakhareva, Justin Pomada reveal a romantic yearning for an ideal. Searching for an ideal, they are captured by the “theories” of nihilism. Leskov regarded the contradictions in the inner world of both “Lermontov’s man” and the characters in “Nowhere” as a feature of the Russian national character. The writer’s sympathy for such a spiritual experience is accompanied by a desire to understand its moral origins. The quotes from Lermontov overcome the “pamphlet,” “tendentious” nature of the text, which Leskov’s contemporaries accused him of, to form a hidden tragic plot.

Tennessee Williams’s lyrical drama

Critics, scholars and readers alike have hailed Tennessee Williams as the greatest Southern playwright and one of the most distinguished dramatists in the history of American drama. He is indisputably the most renowned American playwright of the second half of the 20th century. This article endeavors to make an overview of Tennessee Williams’s lyrical drama, focusing on its main features such as characterization, art, language, major themes represented in his plays, etc. Williams introduced the innovative concept of the Plastic Theater into the American drama, which combined all elements of production- dialogue, action, setting, lighting, even props - in a unified and symbolic expression of truth. Williams was a very prolific playwright, poet and prose writer but his three plays- The Glass Menagerie, his most experimental play; A Streetcar Named Desire, his masterpiece; and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his most popular play- have entered and captivated the imagination of theater audiences for generations.

“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.

Drama-Music Communication in Opera Performance

The study “Drama-Music Communication in Opera Performance” builds on my 35-year experience of lyric drama in opera production. In my career as a director, which spanned from Baroque opera to contemporary opera, I was intrigued by the multiple connections between the musical dramaturgy, vocal expressiveness, stage image and impact on the audience. Consequently, I realised that all these elements which rely on musical scores are connected by something similar to the principle of communicating vessels: with genuine and intense musical-dramatic communication, the artistic emotion may reach the same level in all the components of the connections mentioned above.

Пьеса Григория Горина «Прощай, Конферансье!» и ее воплощение на крымской сцене

The paper aims to investigate the figurative specificity, particularly genre and style peculiarities, image system, compositional structure of the play “Farewell, Entertainer!” by Gregory Gorin, one of the leading representatives of Russian dramaturgy in the second half of 20th century. It points out common superficiality concerning this play as not deeply dramatic and sketched one. However one can see a conceptual structure behind its postmodern inlaying of composition, which first of all shows through an original system of characters. The figure of a protagonist is in the centre of this system, which is rather traditional. Yet the lead character is not just the leading one — he, in part due to his profession, dominates the events on stage which creates the illusion of immediate telling about them to spectators, the hero’s contemporaries, including us, sitting in theatrical hall. Such two-dimensionality demands the ability of quick and spontaneous switching from the system of experience to the system of Brecht’s playful alienation or even of combining them. Along with the main character and other leads, taking an essential part in dramatic collisions, we meet a whole range of secondary and episodic figures. There are no sharp edges between different categories of characters. In the event of such compositional flickering the image of people destined to overcome the hardest adversities in war and in the post-war times obtains a special life credibility and stereoscopic quality. Author’s genre definition as “play-concert” emphasizes singularity of the play’s structure. At the same time this play involves genre features of social and psychological, lyrical and epic drama, with a pronounced tragic sound.

La ´ópera Fidelio en España (1805-1936)

El presente trabajo se centra en la recepción en España de la única ópera escrita por Beethoven, estrenada en el Teatro Real en noviembre de 1893 y puesta en escena en el Teatro del Liceo en enero de 1921. Para comprender los motivos por los cuales se ofrecieron únicamente dos representaciones de Fidelio en España con anterioridad a la Guerra Civil, se reflexiona sobre el estado previo en que se encontraba el teatro de ópera en este país y sobre el conocimiento de la figura de Beethoven y de su ópera en particular. Asimismo, tras una lectura exhaustiva de las fuentes hemerográficas y revistas conservadas, se analizan los acontecimientos relacionados con las dos representaciones mencionadas, la recepción por parte del público y las reflexiones estéticas surgidas. Este artículo ofrece también información sobre distintos intentos frustrados de puesta en escena, así como datos relativos a las primeras retransmisiones de la ópera que llegaron desde Europa a España durante los años 20 y 30. Finalmente, todo ello nos llevará a conclusiones respecto a la visión de Beethoven y de su ópera en España, que no llegó a ser aceptada por no adaptarse a los moldes de la escuela italiana y por la importancia que concedió al elemento orquestal, rasgo que dio lugar a distintas deliberaciones relacionadas con Wagner, el drama lírico, la música pura y la dramática.

Фаустианская семантика интонационной драматургии Второй симфонии С. Рахманинова

Интонационной драматургии Второй симфонии С. Рахманинова – центра притяжения в структуре знаковой системы искусства композитора – свойственно обилие знаков, позволяющих сопрягать ее содержание с ближайшими и удаленными от нее по времени сочинениями гения. Применение контекстного метода исследования, преодоление устоявшихся трактовок Второй Симфонии как «пейзажной» и «элегической» позволило выявить в ней семантическую программу, характерную фаустианской тематике в наследии композитора, трактовать произведение как лирическую драму, пророческое предварение грядущей «фаустовской» Сонаты. Тема вступления І части трактована как исходный «фаустовский комплекс», «фауст-тема» (семы сомнения, неразрешимого вопроса, вечной неудовлетворенности, разочарования) рахманиновской «Фауст-симфонии». Здесь установлены черты драмы рока в его индивидуализировано-внутреннем и объективировано-внешнем воплощениях. Во II части обнаружены интонационные символы мефистофельского и Вечноженственного начал в контексте развития фаустианской концепции. Тема любви в III части подобна Благой Вести. Исходя из фаустианского контекста, Finale представлен как утверждение мужества героя, прошедшего испытания сомнением, противостояние остроте мефистофельской иронии, очищение божественной любовью. В IV части воплощен образ Фауста, подобный герою финала II части гетевской трагедии, «высокая душа» которого познала «высший миг» истины. Обнаружение фаустианского потенциала позволяет усматривать в Симфонии черты как скрытой, так и философской программности. Изучение Второй Симфонии в контексте интонационно-семантического «словаря» в наследии Рахманинова позволяет пересмотреть трактовку произведения как празднично-пейзажного. Рубежное сочинение в наследии композитора рассмотрено как зона притяжения близких (в частности, «фаустовской сонаты») и удаленных во времени («Симфонические танцы») сочинений. Раскрытие ассоциативного интонационно-знакового слоя произведения способствует выявлению многомерности композиторского замысла, диалектики рахманиновского мироощущения.

MAYAKOVSKY’s LYRICAL THEATRE

The research is devoted to the phenomenon of lyrical drama as the genre-type synthesis result. Based on Bataille-school ideas and «experience-limit» conceptions, it finds justification in relation to V.V. Mayakovsky poetry. Specificity of “experience-limit” as radical self-questioning consists in taking subjects away from themselves - splitting up on few “Me”. That process has a systematizing function in the Mayakovsky’s art: his lyrical person plays a part of the main drama’s actor, trying to determinate himself by fitting experiences of different hypostasis and reflecting them through the dominant person poetic experience. “Experience-limit”, going through the whole art system of Mayakovsky, gives a reason not just characterize it as lyrical drama, but expand the last to the “lyrical theatre”, which contains not Mayakovsky’s dramaturgy legacy itself, but that dramatic part his lyric based on. Aesthetic categories, characterized within theatre discourse as “The Cast”, “The Vestment”, “The Going On Stage”, “The Prologue”, “The Action Development”, “The Acting Parts” and “The Animal Etudes”, was marked in the lyric theatre concept. These categories find its comprehension in the article and also form an idea about common aspects of experimental aesthetic, which allows to include Mayakovsky’s lyrical theatre in the line epochal art searches. So, the article claims the parallel between inner art space’s metaphysic and New Drama, where objective reality surpasses the will of the person, as determining factor, sharing on lyrical theatre at whole. The lyrical drama of V.V. Mayakovsky is the tragedy (which protomodel is archaic mystery drama) since the beginning.

Directing the ‘Unfinished Scene’: Utopia and the Role of the Poet in Shelley's Hellas

Hellas; A Lyrical Drama (1822) reveals profound tensions in Shelley's thinking about the role that poets play in writing the future. In the Preface, Shelley invokes his ‘poet's privilege’ to imagine the outcome of the ‘unfinished scene’ – the ongoing Greek War of Independence – but the final chorus, which begins by triumphantly announcing the return of a ‘great age’, also voices an anxiety that it may be impossible to imagine a future that is unbound by the failures of the past. This essay examines the ways in which Shelley imagines the outcome of the Greek War in Hellas, especially in dialogue with the claims he makes for poetry and poets in A Defence of Poetry (comp. 1821). I argue that what emerges in Hellas is a fraught form of utopian thought that is defined by hazardous struggle, but which may ultimately direct humanity towards a better future.

COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGY OF DRAMA LYRIZATION

The article is devoted to the study of the communicative strategy of drama lyrization. The study was based on the works by Oleksander Oles. In modern literary criticism, the lyrization of drama is associated with the subjectivization of dramatic action. Different types of lyrical composition of drama serve for the structural organization of the author's emotions and thus implement the communicative strategy of lyrization of drama through rhythmic-intonational organization of the text, polyphony of the author's position, musicality of the text, combination of stage realism and artistic conventionality. Expression in a lyrical drama realizes many meanings, which are often transmitted through a metaphor or a symbol. One of the functions of this type of expression in lyrical drama is to blur the line between the poetic experience and the word, which has absorbed the potential of the poet's feelings, and to give it a symbolic status. At the level of the genre in the late nineteenth - early twentieth century the dramatic theme is actualized, which is a reflection of the tendency to lyricize the drama. It is realized by the poeticization of drama as a manifestation of communicativeness or operable properties of lyricism in drama, when the laws of lyricism become the structure-forming foundation of drama. Based on the communicative strategy of form transformation, Oleksandr Oles managed to create a lyrical drama with no traditional division into actions or acts. Instead, there is only a graphical-mathematical division into episodes, which unite the text of the play with a dream vision, a model of in life, which has a conditionally ironic game character. Due to the vision of the dream, the author of the drama actualized the world - theater, symbolized the chronotope of the play, giving it a conditional and playful-ironic character.

Androgyny as Mental Revolution in Act 4 of Prometheus Unbound

ABSTRACT Apart from in his translation of Plato’s Symposium as The Banquet, the word ‘androgyny’ does not appear within Shelley’s writings, but androgynous images are extant throughout his works. The androgynous union of Asia and Prometheus, the ungendering of Demogorgon, and the Earth and the Moon’s shifting gendered pronouns in Act 4 echo Shelley’s desire for ‘a future state of being’ wherein ‘these detestable distinctions [of male and female] will surely be abolished’. The Banquet is a catalyst for the lyrical drama’s composition, wherein androgyny becomes Shelley’s central strategy for inciting mental revolution in his audience of ideal readers. Shelley assumes the self-ordained role of Plato’s ideal reader through his creative translation of The Banquet, where the mental union of writer and translator radically expands androgyny as the traditional union of the masculine and the feminine to include the psychic union of the poet and the reader. Drawing upon the dialogic, dramatic form of Plato’s text, his subtle instruction of his reader, and his playfulness with gender, Shelley transmutes elements of The Banquet into verse in Prometheus Unbound in order to encourage a mental revolution in his own readership.

Re-canonizing the Shanhaijing in the world (literature): the myth, the play and the comic book

ABSTRACT In 1989, Gao Xingjian 高行健 – a Chinese-born artist (1940), French citizen (1997) and Nobel Prize for Literature (2000) – gave birth to the Shanhaijing zhuan 山海經傳 (Of Mountains and Seas), a tragicomedy in three acts. As the title evokes, the lyrical drama is inspired to the ancient mythology of the Shanhaijing 山海經 (The Classic of Mountains and Seas), an encyclopaedic cosmography compiled from the Warring States period to the Western Han dynasty (4th-1st century BC). By creating this play, the Nobel Laureate re-codified a Chinese canonical work into a contemporary play. After that, an American comic book based on Gao tragicomedy appeared, Guideways through Mountains and Seas. Based on the assumption that the three works are genealogically related, the paper describes the changes taking place through the process of transposition, by focusing on the macro- and micro-textual profiles. Thus, it re-discusses the canon and the dynamics canonicity, by revealing how translation and intertextuality both ensue from the canonization of literature (and world literature) and empower its circulation and consecration beyond frontiers.