Women, Modernism and Performance (REVIEW COPY)

Farfan, Penny. Women, Modernism and Performance (REVIEW COPY). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. First edition. Quarto. XI, [1], 173, [1]pp. Original photographic wrappers over black cloth with gold lettering on spine. Printer’s device on title page. This captivating work is an interdisciplinary study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within – and in relation to – modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction, and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and a legal trial, Penny Farfan expands on theatre-historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant-garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall, and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities, and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. Wrappers, binding and interior in very good condition. vg. Hardcover. (29981) $50