Women, Modernism, and Performance

Women, Modernism, and Performance 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 legal trials, 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.

• An interdisciplinary study that examines a range of texts and performances by significant figures in theatre, literature and dance, including Ibsen, Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Isadora Duncan • Combines biography, performance theory, theatre history and criticism, textual analysis and feminist theory to illuminate the intersections of women, modernism and performance • Contributes to the ongoing feminist revision of theatre history and modernist literary history

List of illustrations; List of abbreviations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. From \'Hedda Gabler\' to \'Votes for Women\': Elizabeth Robins\'s early feminist critique of Ibsen; 2. Feminist Shakespeare: Ellen Terry’s comic ideal; 3. Unimagined parts, unlived selves: Virginia Woolf on Ellen Terry and the art of acting; 4. Staging the ob/scene; 5. Writing/performing: Virginia Woolf between the acts; 6. Feminism, tragedy, history: the fate of Isadora Duncan; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.