Modernists and the Theatre examines how six key modernists, who are
best known as poets and novelists, engaged with the realm of theatre and
performance. Drawing on a wealth of unfamiliar archival material and
fresh readings of neglected documents, James Moran demonstrates how
these literary figures interacted with the playhouse, exploring W.B.
Yeats's earliest playwriting, Ezra Pound's onstage acting, the links
between James Joyce's and D.H. Lawrence's sense of drama, T.S. Eliot's
thinking about theatrical popularity, and the feminist politics of
Virginia Woolf's small-scale theatrical experimentation.
While these modernists often made hostile comments about drama, this
volume highlights how the writers were all repeatedly drawn to the form.
While Yeats and Pound were fascinated by the controlling aspect of
theatre, other authors felt inspired by theatre as a democratic forum in
which dissenting voices could be heard. Some of these modernists used
theatre to express and explore identities that had previously been
sidelined in the public forum, including the working-class mining
communities of Lawrence's plays, the sexually unconventional and
non-binary gender expressions of Joyce's fiction, and the female
experience that Woolf sought to represent and discuss in terms of
theatrical performance.
These writers may be known primarily for creating non-dramatic texts,
but this book demonstrates the importance of the theatre to the
activities of these authors, and shows how a sense of the theatrical
repeatedly motivated the wider thinking and writing of six major figures
in literary history.
