Romantic drama
By: edited by Gerald Gillespie.
Contributors: Gillespie, Gerald Ernest Paul, 1933-
Series: A comparative history of literatures in European languages ;; v. 9
Publisher: J. Benjamins Pub. Co.
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Amsterdam; Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 516
Subjects: European drama -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Romanticism -- Europe.; Theater -- Europe -- History -- 19th century.
Description: In Romantic Drama, three dozen comparatists join forces for a supranational, crosscultural reexamination of the deep paradigm shifts appearing around the start of the nineteenth century which revolutionized drama as a literary art within the enormous civilization constituted by Europe and her overseas extensions.

Romantic pronouncements on the canon and poetics of drama, the symptomatic subject-matters treated by Romantic playwrights, the structural means by which they expressed their view of the world, and regional peculiarities are illuminated from multiple perspectives. The volume aspires to skirt the pitfalls of simplistic genetic or teleological thinking.

It does not treat Romanticism as a limited "period" dominated by some construed singular master-ethos or dialectic; rather, it follows the literary patterns and dynamics of Romanticism as a flow of interactive currents across geocultural frontiers.

Finally, this involves recognizing the Romantic heritage in literary phenomena reaching into our own times. Thus the Romantic celebration of imagination, creation of a theater of the mind, experience of intertextuality, dissolving of generic boundaries, and embrace of "myth" as a challenge to older "history" figure among the important topics, as do Romantic foreshadowings of Symbolist, Existentialist, and Absurdist drama.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [465]-487) and indexes.