A groundbreaking study on the vital role of baroque theater in shaping
modernist philosophy, literature, and performance.
Finalist for the Outstanding Book Award by the Association for Theatre
in Higher Education, Honorable Mention for the Balakian Prize by the
International Comparative Literature Association, Winner of the Helen
Tartar Book Subvention Award by the American Comparative Literature
Association, Finalist of the MSA First Book Prize by the Modernist
Studies Association
Baroque style--with its emphasis on ostentation, adornment, and
spectacle--might seem incompatible with the dominant forms of art since
the Industrial Revolution, but between 1875 and 1935, European and
American modernists connected to the theater became fascinated with it.
In Baroque Modernity, Joseph Cermatori argues that the memory of
seventeenth-century baroque stages helped produce new forms of theater,
space, and experience around the turn of the twentieth century. In
response, modern theater helped give rise to the development of the
baroque as a modern philosophical idea.
The book focuses on avant-gardists whose writing takes place between
theory and performance: philosophical theater-makers and theatrical
philosophers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter
Benjamin, and Gertrude Stein. Moving between page and stage, this study
tracks the remnants of seventeenth-century theater through modernist
aesthetics across an array of otherwise disparate materials, including
modern opera, Bertolt Brecht's Epic Theater, poetic tragedies, and
miracle plays. By reexamining the twentieth century's engagements with
Gianlorenzo Bernini, William Shakespeare, Claudio Monteverdi, Calderón
de la Barca, and other seventeenth-century predecessors, the book
delineates an enduring tradition of baroque performance. Along the way,
Cermatori expands our familiar narratives of "the modern" and traces a
history of theatricality that reverberates into the twenty-first
century.
Baroque Modernity will appeal to readers in a wide array of
disciplines, including comparative literature, theater and performance,
art and music history, intellectual history, and aesthetic theory.
