A study of the tension between modernist literature and theater. After reconstructing the emergence of Wagner's extreme form of theatricality, this book examines writers and directors--from Mallarmé and Yeats to Stein, Joyce, and Beckett--whose suspicion of the theater motivated their most daring formal innovations, their most important poetic choices, and their most radical reforms of the stage.

Expanded German edition: Rombach, 2012.