Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque [Hardcover]

Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque is the first work to link the study of metatheater with the concepts of baroque and neobaroque. Arguing that the onset of European modernity in the early seventeenth century and both the modernist and the postmodernist periods of the twentieth century witnessed a flourishing of the phenomenon of theater that reflects on itself as theater, the author reexamines the concepts of metatheater, baroque, and neobaroque through a pairing and close analysis of seventeenth and twentieth century plays. The comparisons include Jean Rotrous The True Saint Genesius with Jean-Paul Sartres Kean and Jean Genets The Blacks; Pierre Corneilles LIllusion comique with Tony Kushners The Illusion; Gian Lorenzo Berninis The Impresario with Luigi Pirandellos theater-in-theater trilogy; Shakespeares Hamlet with Pirandellos Henry IV and Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Moli?res Impromptu de Versailles with impromptus by Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, and Eug?ne Ionesco. Metatheater and Modernity also examines the role of technology in the creating and breaking of illusions in both centuries. In contrast to previous work on metatheater, it emphasizes the metatheatrical role of comedy. Metatheater, the author concludes, is both performance and performative: it accomplishes a perceptual transformation in its audience both by defending theater and exposing the illusory quality of the world outside.Mary Ann Frese Witt received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and is now Professor Emerita at North Carolina State University.[T]here are a few scholars more equipped than Mary Ann Frese Witt to lead the reader through the complex web of scholarship on metatheater and to break new ground on the subject. ... She takes into account every major study on metatheater since the birth of the term, and thus provides the reader with the most useful, accessible, and up-to-date bibliography for anyone workinlã,