1st Edition

Baroque Lorca An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage

By Andrés Pérez-Simón Copyright 2020
    170 Pages
    by Routledge

    170 Pages
    by Routledge

    Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba).

    Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

    Introduction

    Chapter 1: The Question of Allegory

    Chapter 2: Of Humans and Puppets

    Chapter 3: Facing the Audience

    Chapter 4: Revolution in the Playhouse

    Chapter 5: Writing for the Stage

    Epilogue

    Biography

    Andrés Pérez-Simón is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Cincinnati. He has published essays on world literature, drama, film and literary theory. He is the author of Drama, literatura, filosofía: itinerarios del realismo y modernismo europeos (Fundamentos, 2015), and editor and translator of the critical anthology ‘Despistemes’: la teoría literaria y cultural de Emil Volek (Verbum, 2018).

    "Baroque Lorca is intelligently argued and full of provocative insights… Even when I found myself resisting certain emphases and conclusions in the book, I felt that my resistance was a productive one, leading me to question my own prejudices and sometimes change my mind."

    - Jonathan Mayhew, University of Kansas