In this superb examination of theatricality and its detractors, Martin Puchner takes a close look at the theories of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Butler Yeats, Bertolt Brecht, and Samuel Beckett . . . In order to circumvent theatricality, Puchner observes, these authors shared common strategies: the superimposition of stage directions, choral figures, narratives, and commentators on the action, and characters who observe their own actions--all designed to disrupt mimesis, illusion, and theatrical virtuosity . . . [An] important study.

A breathtaking tour de force through different languages, genres, and millennia from Plato to the Wooster Group, Stage Fright opens up a theoretical path for the reintegration of theater studies into the German studies discourse . . . Puchner argues persuasively that theater plays a constitutive role in modernism and proposes theatricality as the divisive aesthetical moment in the opposition between modernism and the avant-garde . . . Puchner's book is original and exciting even in its asides and footnotes . . . an intellectual treat and a must-read for any scholar dealing with twentieth-century literature and culture.

After this study, a lot of polemic energy spent in debate between pro-theatricalists and anti-theatricalists, between adherents of modernism and those of the avant-garde, can be spared. The fault lines between solipsistic and elitist modernism on the one side, and a collaborative and political avant-garde on the other, must be drawn anew. As Puchner brilliantly demonstrates, the radical difference must be thought, first and foremost, along the parameters of anti-theatrical modernism versus the theatrical avant-garde . . . By doing justice to the minute details of . . . the dramas and theories of Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Brecht and Beckett, Puchner makes a compelling case for the central thesis of the book. Moreover, Puchner . . . provides a new vocabulary to analyze modernism's 'hate affair' with the theater.

Puchner's vigorous discussion . . . provides a new way to rethink drama's relationship both with the actual theatre and with its closeted literary counterparts . . . [and] offers a provocative remapping of the twentieth century's theatrical (and anti-theatrical) energies.

A provocative reassessment of modernism and the post-Wagnerian theater. Stage Fright is well written, clearly argued, and nicely organized, with a diction that is authoritative without being stuffy . . . Those interested in the history of the theater will find in Puchner's emphasis on the value and devaluing of theatricality a means of re-reading a century. Scholars of modernism may find this value and its articulation in Stage Fright equally useful for approaching other texts and genres.

Puchner's positioning of the Epic Theater in a larger, exhaustively and well-theorized context of modernist attempts to reconfigure the actor and create legible gestures by diegetic means certainly makes his book a major contribution to Brecht scholarship.

This book--with its thoughtful examination of difficult questions--is exceptionally smart and will usefully recalibrate discussions of modernism and modernist theatre.

A capital addition to the history of theater as well as an innovative theoretical approach rooted in literary history.

Philosophy as well as arts and drama collections will find this thought-provoking.