A Global Doll's House

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins

   Pages 1-23

3. Cultural Transmission

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-28

      PDF

   2. Mapping the Early Noras

      • Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins

      Pages 29-70

   3. ‘Peddling’ Et dukkehjem: The Role of the State

      • Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins

      Pages 71-110

4. Adaptation

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 111-115

      PDF

   2. Adaptation at a Distance

      • Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins

      Pages 117-156

   3. Ibsen’s Challenge: The Tarantella Rehearsal

      • Julie Holledge, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, Joanne Tompkins

      Pages 157-196

5. Back Matter

   Pages 197-233

   PDF

This book addresses a deceptively simple question: what accounts for the global success of A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s most popular play? Using maps, networks, and images to explore the world history of the play’s production, this question is considered from two angles: cultural transmission and adaptation. Analysing the play’s transmission reveals the social, economic, and political forces that have secured its place in the canon of world drama; a comparative study of the play’s 135-year production history across five continents offers new insights into theatrical adaptation. Key areas of research include the global tours of nineteenth-century actress-managers, Norway’s soft diplomacy in promoting gender equality, representations of the female performing body, and the sexual vectors of social change in theatre.

• Henrik Ibsen
• nineteenth century theatre
• Norwegian theatre
• A Doll’s House
• Et dukkehjem
• IbsenStage
• digital humanities
• international performances
• intercultural adaptation
• cultural transmission
• world drama
• production history
• Nora Helmer
• female performing body
• gender equality

“This book, using digital data analytics as a major methodological tool, opens an entirely new door to the Ibsen research of the future. The writing style is very concise and scientific, yet leaves space for playfulness and surprise. … The book includes not only rigorous scholarly narratives, but also visualized graphs, maps, and networks that allow us to understand patterns, structures, and models of Ibsen’s global success from a metaphorical bird’s-eye view.” (Antje Budde, Theatre Journal, Vol. 70 (2), June, 2018)



“The book can be considered an invitation to discover new methodological ways to approach Humanities and a complex vision upon Ibsen’s plays. Indeed, the rich distant view proposed by A Global Doll’s House praises the global experience not only as an encounter between local cultures, but also as the full expression of both the controversial and heterogeneous aspects that make them unique.” (Gianina Druță, Metacritic Journal For Comparative Studies And Theory, Vol. 3 (2), December, 2017)

“A Global Doll's House provides a welcome consideration of how the varied forces of performance venues, financial and symbolic capital, and cultural constructions of motherhood and the female body around the world have acted as external constraints on the artistic diversity of performances and adaptations. … The book thus offers an innovative and thoughtful way to approach the production history of a single play using digitized records, and it will be very useful for future scholars working on similar projects.” (Dean Krouk, Modern Drama, Vol. 60 (04), 2017)



“A Global Doll’s House with its theoretical and analytical approach is an invaluable contribution to the field of Ibsen studies. While the book identifies the conventional explanations of the play’s global success, with a close examination of photographs, maps, graphs or networks, it incorporates new methods in Digital Humanities and a deeperinterrogation of digitised production records.” (Mariam Zarif, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, 2016)

“For the first time, we see deployed here a digital-humanities methodology that can pose and answer global-Ibsen questions at the analytical scale they deserve. With nimble movement between close and distant readings of evidence, the book really does make possible a “new way of looking” at the mass of information generated by Ibsen’s A Doll House and its performance history. …  Anyone engaged in the critical evaluation of individual productions of A Doll House would do well to consult this groundbreaking presentation of an international baseline of performance interpretation, one based in a cumulative historical practice that up to this point has eluded scholarly analysis due to the inherent limitations of existing methods.” (Mark Sandberg, Professor of Film & Media and Scandinavian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA)

“Digital humanities meet Ibsen, revealing astonishing patterns and amazing diversity. This first global history of one ofthe world’s most famous plays is a landmark contribution to Ibsen scholarship, performance history and cultural studies.” (Narve Fulsås, Professor of Modern History, University of Tromsø, Norway)

“A very fine example of the new field of digital humanities, A Global Doll's House is a model exploration of the possibilities which new technologies offer, using them to provide precise and incisive answers to formerly unsolvable questions. It is, in fact, an important contribution to Ibsen Studies.” (Erika Fischer- Lichte, Professor of Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)

• Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

  Julie Holledge, Frode Helland

• School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

  Jonathan Bollen

• Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia

  Joanne Tompkins

Led by Professor Julie Holledge (Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo), this collaborative project brings together Ibsen specialists with scholars in digital humanities and theatre studies: Dr Jonathan Bollen (University of New South Wales, Australia), Director of AusStage, the Australian database for researching performance (2006-13); Professor Frode Helland, (Director of the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, Norway), author of Ibsen in Practice (2015); and Professor Joanne Tompkins (University of Queensland, Australia), author of Theatre’s Heterotopias (2014), and co-author with Holledge of Women’s Intercultural Performance (2001), winner of the Rob Jordan Book Prize. 

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