Pendergast Joan of Arc on the Stage and Her Sisters in Sublime Sanctity

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-030-27889-2
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 281 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries

This book examines the figure of Joan of Arc as depicted in stage works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially those based on or related to Schiller’s 1801 romantic tragedy,
Die Jungfrau von Orleans
(
The Maid of Orleans
). The author elucidates Schiller’s appropriation of themes from Euripides’s Iphigenia plays, chiefly the quality of “sublime sanctity,” which transforms Joan’s image from a victim of fate to a warrior-prophet who changes history through sheer force of will.  Finding the best-known works of his time about her – Voltaire’s
La pucelle d’Orléans and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part I
– utterly dissatisfying, Schiller set out to replace them.
Die Jungfrau von Orleans
was a smashing success and inspired various subsequent treatments, including Verdi’s opera
Giovanna d’Arco
and a translation by the father of Russian Romanticism, Vasily Zhukovsky, on which Tchaikovsky based his opera
Orleanskaya deva
(
The Maid of Orleans
).  In turn, the book’s final chapter examines Shaw’s
Saint Joan
and finds that the Irish playwright’s vociferous complaints about Schiller’s “romantic flapdoodle” belie a surprising affinity for Schiller’s approach.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pendergast, John

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1.  The Palimpsest of Euripides, Shakespeare, and Voltaire.- Chapter 2.  Sublime Sanctity: Schiller’s New Tragic Joan.- Chapter 3.  Lacuna and Enigma: Verdi’s Giovanna d’Arco in Light of Schiller’s Play.- Chapter 4.  Patriotic Elegy and Epic Illusion: Schiller’s Johanna in Russia.- Chapter 5.  The Skeptic Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks: Shaw’s Saint Joan. Concluding Thoughts on Joan in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Über Autor(innen)

John Pendergast
is an Assistant Professor of Russian at West Point. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, a master’s degree in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Arizona, and a bachelor’s degree in Music from Birmingham-Southern College. A graduate of the Russian program at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, his research focuses on music and letters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia and Germany.