Ibsen's Foreign Contagion

The Independent Theatre's production of Ghosts in London in 1891 produced a series of reviews that were laden with disease metaphors. Ibsen, in the age of the classic epidemic, comes to be perceived by his English hosts as a contagious entityThis scholarly monograph treats the theatrical reviews as serious cultural artefacts in order to avoid reducing them to mere entertaining invective in order, ultimately, to trace the transmission of modern dramatic innovation from Ibsen to Arthur Wing Pinero and George Bernard Shaw.