Mapping the -- not always chronological -- trajectory from representationalist-naturalist theatre (Strindberg, Sartre) to the theatre of the historical avant-garde (Brecht, Artaud), this book puts milestones of modernist theatre in conversation with new materialist, posthumanist philosophy and affect theory. Arguing that existing modernization theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies – nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and ... More

Mapping the -- not always chronological -- trajectory from representationalist-naturalist theatre (Strindberg, Sartre) to the theatre of the historical avant-garde (Brecht, Artaud), this book puts milestones of modernist theatre in conversation with new materialist, posthumanist philosophy and affect theory. Arguing that existing modernization theories have been unnecessarily one-sided, Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama offers a rewriting of modernity that cuts across binary methodologies – nature and culture, mind and matter, epistemology and ontology, critique and affirmative writing, dramatic and postdramatic theatre. Going beyond the exclusive focus on questions of identity, representation and meaning on the one hand or materiality on the other hand, the book captures the complex material-discursive forces that have shaped modernity and modern theatre. In powerfully prescient readings of modern anxiety, contagion and performance, the volume specifically reworks the biopolitical, immunitarian exclusions that mark Western epistemology leading up to and beyond modernity’s totalitarian crisis point. The book reveals the performativity of theatre in its double sense -- as theatrical production and as the intra-activity of an open and dynamic system of relations between multiple human and more-than-human actants, energies, and affects. In modern theatre, public and private, human and more-than-human, materiality and meaning co-productively collapse in a common life.