Drama and «Ideenschmuggel»: Inserted Performance as Communicative Strategy in Karl Gutzkow’s Plays 1839-1849: 43 (North American Studies in Nineteenth-century German Literature and Culture) - Softcover

Baker, K. Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3039110950 ISBN 13: 9783039110957

Publisher: Verlag Peter Lang, 2008

Synopsis

This monograph details Gutzkow’s recurring use of performance-within-the-play as a means of encouraging an active, political response by the audience. He incorporates an internal audience viewing a performance on stage in order to model an ideal of dramatic reception for the audiences of his own play. Gutzkow structures the narrative contextualization of these performances as reflections of specific issues in the German states of the Vormärz. Beginning with an overview of theoretical and literary texts from the 1830s, this study traces Gutzkow’s transferral of self-reflexive structures from his novels of this decade into his first staged play, Richard Savage (1839), and on through Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844) and Uriel Acosta (1845). It concludes by portraying Der Königsleutnant (1849) as a transitional work that shows Gutzkow’s decision to return to the novel as a consequence of the failure of his plays to attain the reception he intended. By using the coherency of the communicated message instead of fealty to aesthetic norms as the evaluative criteria for discussing Gutzkow’s plays, the book exposes an innovative mode of specifically literary social criticism in these works that complements their traditional assessment as documentation of the cultural history of Liberalism in this period.

About this title

About the Author

The Author: K. Scott Baker has been Assistant Professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 2003. He received his M.A .and Ph.D. in Germanics from the University of Washington, and his B.A. in German and History from the University of Oregon.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verlag Peter Lang
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3039110950
• ISBN 13: 9783039110957
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 194