In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS drama Enrico IV as "an allegory of capitalist economic development" (r 3r) in its depiction of the emancipating effects of what Dombroski tenns the "madness of modernity" (133), in which "Enrico" simultaneously reigns in absolute authority and becomes increasing alienated from both his real and his invented surroundings. Corrado Donati treats Pirandello's complex depiction of individual desire in "Eros and Solitude in Pirandello's Short Stories," the essay that completes this section. "Innovations," the book's final section, is a good illustration of Gieri and Biasin's claim that "Pirandell0 continues to be present in mysterious and challenging ways" as "ever new messages and meanings are discovered"( I 8). Daniela Bini's finely argued "Enacting the Dissolution of the Self: Woman as one, No One, and One Hundred Thousand" is a philosophically infonned, feminist reading of the significant function and "privileged space" (165) embodied in Pirandello's female characters (particularly those in the dramas) and in their treasure of richly developed and powerful communicative modes. Thomas Harrison's study of "Regicide, Parricide, and Tyrannicide in l/ fu Mattia Pascal: Stealing from the Father to Give to the Son" offers a fresh and intriguing reading of the novel and its male subject, describing Pirandello's essential overturning of ancient patterns of father/son relations. Wladimir Krysinski's "Pirande110 in the Discursive Economies of Modernity and Postmoderism ," the final essay in the anthology (which first appeared in Krysinski 's 1989 Le paradigme inquiet: Pirandello et Ie champ de 10 modernite), takes postmodemism as a new interpretive lens with which to "reactivate and rethink" (215) Pirandello's works. Writing that "Pirandello's works reveal themselves as at once modern in their totality and open to postmodernism" (217), Krysinski outlines the particular strain of modernity typified in Pirandello : the quest for meaning, of the self and of social structures, and the conflicts or new paradigms evoked. Krysinski concludes, "Pirandello's place is significant, because it is thanks to him that theatre assures its self-regulation and transfoms itself ....thus the surpassing of the existential stage that prepared itself in Pirandello foreshadows the infinite play of the theatre of the world and the theatre of the theatre at the stage of a new modernity or of postmodernism . Whatever the tenns '" Pirandello un~tes them beyond masks and performances and within theories" (226). JANA O'KEEFE BAZZONI, BARUCH COLLEGE, THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK DAN REBELLATO. [956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 280, illustrated. $98.00; $32.99, paperback. I always pick up Routledge catalogues with a sense of dread, preparing myself Book Reviews 459 to read about the publication of yet another fifty episteme-shifting titles. One day, perhaps, the Routledge book blurb will be studied as a genre in its own right - as the apotheosis of hyperbole in the late twentieth century. Routledge do, of course, publish much of what is most innovative and groundbreaking these days, but I sometimes wish they could be a little more bashful about it. Dan Rebellato's new book is announced in the 1999 catalogue with the usual understatement: "Rebellato has rewritten the history of [...] Modem British Drama." Couldn 't he just tinker a bit here and there? But the fact of the matter is that, as his publishers promise, Rebellato has comprehensively and brilliantly rethought modem British drama's putative founding moment in the mid-1950s. On the face of it, Rebellato's aim is to displace 8 May 1956 as the key date in modem British theatre history. But 1956 and All That is far more sophisticated than a simple attempt at re-periodisation or the reclaiming of neglected playwrights pre-Osborne. The lively polemical introduction might lead readers to think that Rebellato is trying to knock Look Back in Anger off a perch it undeservedly occupies: certainly he cites numerous accounts of post-war theatre that uncritically accord that playa founding slaLUS. However, he overstates the case somewhat, as is clear from the dates of the critical works he cites, most of them from the 1950S and 1960s. The special reputation of Osborne's play was formed three, even four...

pdf

Share