Ibsen Cycle

“Johnston’s analysis of the design of Ibsen’s mature plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken is the single most provocative and critically exciting book of Ibsen criticism in decades and will most likely alter significantly the course of Ibsen criticism.”—Choice

“In the less than two decades since The Ibsen Cycle, Johnston’s impact has been so profound that there has been an almost complete turnaround in Ibsen criticism and Ibsen production. . . . No one writes about Ibsen like Brian Johnston.”—Michael X. Zelenak, Yale University (Comparitive Drama)

“Attempting no less a task than to demonstrate that Ibsen planned his last twelve plays, beginning with Pillars of Society, as a cycle paralleling exactly Hegel’s account of the evolution of the human consciousness, The Phenomenology of Mind, Johnston offers a fresh look at the Norwegian master. Although there is little specific biographical data is support of the author’s thesis, he argues Hegel’s dramatic method of exposition and Ibsen’s philosophy, Johnston examines each of the twelve plays in considerable detail. Provocative and sophisticated in its approach, this volume should be widely available to scholars and advanced students of modern drama.”—Library Journal

Brian Johnston is editor of Theater Three and author of To the Third Empire (1980) and Text and Supertext in Ibsen's Drama (Penn State, 1989).

Contents

Preface to The Ibsen Cycle ix

Preface to the First Edition xv

Acknowledgments xix

Abbreviations xxi

Introduction 1

PART I

1. The "Dramatic" Content of Hegel's Philosophy 27

2. The Philosophical Content of Ibsen's Drama 65

3. The Structure of the Cycle 98

PART II

4. Archetypal Repetition in Ghosts 189

5. The Dialectic of Rosmersholm 237

6. Death and Transfiguration in The Master Builder 289

Epilogue: Ibsen and Modernism 353

Appendix 1: Ghosts 376

Appendix 2: Rosmersholm 380

Appendix 3: The Master Builder 390

Selected Bibliography 397

Index 404

Literary Studies

           Drama

Philosophy

Theater