Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Absolutely fascinating
"Ghosts", while not as famous as Ibsen's "A Doll's House", is clearly an interesting piece of writing. Nobody denies that. It is an interesting book to analyze, it's a quick read, but very deep, and it leaves a very strong impression on you.

"Ghosts" is in a sense, like "A Doll's House", about something that while still frowned upon today, is much more acceptable. In "Ghosts" there is the theme of the "sins of fathers", and the father's sins are brought to light. Mrs. Alving has been keeping secrets for a very long time, and here is where, through her ghosts, she reveals them.

Well, perhaps it's not as simple as that. The plot is intriguing, the plot twists are surprising, and the ending is disturbingly good. Ibsen created a fascinating story and masterpiece when he wrote "Ghosts", and it's absolutely superb. I highly recommend reading this play to anyone, especially if you liked Ibsen's other works.

Note: I don't suggest buying this play alone in a book like this, though. You might as well buy a book with several of Ibsens plays for the same amount of money, and then you'll get "A Doll's House" too.

An emotional work - very poignant
Though Ibsen is a little bit dated, more so than his successor, Knut Hamsen, he is still one of the greatest minds to come out of Norway and is arguably the father of the modern drama - and also to some extent, the father of the modern novel.He initiated the style which was later taken up by Franz Kafka, Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer), Roman Payne (Crepuscule).Ghosts is a quick read.Dover Thrift Editions makes the price definitely worth it.A must-read once in your life.Highly recommended.

Seemingly simple, but complex study
I chose this book to read and analyse a couple of years ago. It seemed to have simple meaning, but the more I tried to analyse, the more outstanding I found the book, and far from simple.
Helen Alving is a widow and is keeping a secret. One day she tells her friend Manders and he's quite shocked. It all has to do with some money from her dead husband that she doesn't want her son to have. Oswald, her son, comes home from abroad with very sad news. He is ill, and there isn't a cure for him. When Mrs. Alving is told that it was most likely inherited, she tells her son the secret too, and that changes his view on his father. As the book goes on, the intriques grow bigger...
Ibsen is probably more known for his play "A Doll House", but this one is just as great. He was very critical of the society and most, if not all, of his books often has a somewhat hidden story where he debates social matters and also morals. He use symbols and mostly contrasts to give the play a certain atmosphare and meaning. I believe this is one of Ibsen's greatest plays and strongly recommend it to anyone.

Seemingly simple, but complex study
I chose this book to read and analyse a couple of years ago. It seemed to have simple meaning, but the more I tried to analyse, the more outstanding I found the book, and far from simple.
Helen Alving is a widow and is keeping a secret. One day she tells her friend Manders and he's quite shocked. It all has to do with some money from her dead husband that she doesn't want her son to have. Oswald, her son, comes home from abroad with very sad news. He is ill, and there isn't a cure for him. When Mrs. Alving is told that it was most likely inherited, she tells her son the secret too, and that changes his view on his father. As the book goes on, the intriques grow bigger...
Ibsen is probably more known for his play "A Doll House", but this one is just as great. He was very critical of the society and most, if not all, of his books often has a somewhat hidden story where he debates social matters and also morals. He use symbols and mostly contrasts to give the play a certain atmosphare and meaning. I believe this is one of Ibsen's greatest plays and strongly recommend it to anyone.

Ibsen's controversial attack on conventional morality
Although Henrik Ibsen is the first great modern dramatist, his play "Ghosts" ("Gengangere") bears a strong similarity to ancient Greek drama, where the "tragic flaw" of the protagonist lives on in his children. However, in this story the curse on the Alving family has a medical basis. Published in 1881 but not performed until the next year because of its controversial subject matter, "Ghosts" deals with the impact of congenital venereal disease on a family. "Ghosts" strongly reflects Ibsen's desire to attack hypocrisy and conventional morality and caused even more of a furor that his previous drama, "A Doll's House."

Helen Alving is building an orphanage as a memorial to her late husband and the night before the dedication she confesses to her old friend Parson Manders that her husband had been a "degenerate," and she is building the orphanage using her husband's "dirty" money so only her own money will pass on to her son, Oswald, who has just returned from living abroad. But then Oswald confesses he has a debilitating, incurable disease that the doctors believe was inherited. Even from beyond the grave, the "ghost" of Captain Alving ruins the life of his family. Mrs. Alving has to confess her husband's past to their son, destroying the young man's idealized view of his father. Knowing he is dying, Oswald wants to seduce the maid, Regina, so that when he enters the next stage of the disease she will give him poison. Oswald does not care that Regina is really his half-sister, and in the end it will be his mother's decision whether or not to give her son the poison when Oswald begins to have his attack.

The ending of the play constitutes a Rorschach test for the audience, with Ibsen refusing to let them off the hook. "Ghosts" is probably the Ibsen drama that relies most on symbolism, from the heavy use of light/dark imagery to the purifying aspects of fire, to the obvious symbolism of ghosts. Consequently, I think this makes "Ghosts" one of the easier plays by Ibsen for students to analyze. Final Argument: Reading Ibsen's plays in order has greater benefit than usual when reading the works of a single author. If you read "A Doll's House," "Ghosts," "An Enemy of the People," and "The Wild Duck," then you will see the playwright struggling to find a play that will reflect his deeply held beliefs and also find widespread critical and public acceptance. The relationship between each set of plays in the progression becomes insightful, as Ibsen either extends or reverses elements of the previous drama. For teachers of drama there might not be a better quartet of plays to study to show the growth of a major dramatist. ... Read more

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Word count: 4547. ... Read more

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This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
ULFHEIM. Well, there's some one on the point of giving up the ghost, then--in on corner or another.--People that are sickly and rickety should have the goodness to see about getting themselves buried--the sooner the better. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
RITA. [Throwing her arms passionately round his neck.] For then, at last, I should have you to myself alone! And yet--not even then! Not wholly to myself! [Bursts into convulsive weeping.] Oh, Alfred, Alfred--I cannot give you up! ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Worth finding
I somehow doubt this book will suddenly pop up brand-new again, but if it does? Go for it.

Most editions of Ibsen plays don't give much. Three plays if the publisher's enjoying ripping people off, and generally four. Barnes and Noble Classics, which are a pretty good, provide us with perfection in the form of a book - six of Ibsen's most popular and important plays.

A person really need not go much further. This has the plays people like to read ("Hedda Gabler" and "A Doll's House"), as well as one of my favorites ("Ghosts"), and another Ibsen classic, "Peer Gynt". It's not slim, but it was once a grand deal, and perhaps a bit more enthusiasm will encourage it to become an incredible deal once again. If only... ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Henrik Ibsen: An Underlying Theme
A Doll's House is an easy-to-read, interesting play but I was not particularly drawn to it.The dialogue and characters lacked excitement.However, the static setting did showcase an interesting plot.Despite thelackluster personalities and conversations, I was drawn to the conflictIbsen presented: the state of confusedness Nora slipped into in consideringwhether it was right to listen to the blatantly biased society she livedin, which revolved around men or to follow her own natural instincts.Shehad forged with good intentions, but the reality of her action caught upwith her.In Nora's world, a world driven by her husband's needs, desires,and commands, she believes she is helping him by taking out a loan.Thelaws, accusation, judgings are all man made, preventing her from evergetting away with her well-meant deeds.I was thoroughly impressed byIbsen's underlying themes, especially in his time of reservedness andanti-feminism.He accurately depicted the lifestyle of so many women inhis time: as mere playthings, objects of desire, moved about in acookie-cutter dollhouse by manipulative husbands.A Doll's House can beregarded not only as an accurate portrayal of life for women but also as asocial commentary on the wrongs of it.

A DOLL'S HOUSE IS MORE THAN PLAY.
I have aleardy read it more than 6 times ,and Im still feeling that I would like to read it again.Because it makes you release how Ibsen had extraordenary sensetivly.And it learns you how to deal with your wife. ... Read more

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The greatest works by the father of modern theater

Brilliantly exemplifying his landmark contribution to the theater, A Doll House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, and The Master Builder are truly the greatest and best known works of Henrik Ibsen. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Compelling classics
I had to read A Doll House and the Wild Duck for one of my classes, and this was the edition recommended to us by the professor. I was so caught up in Ibsen that I went back and read Hedda Gabler and Master Builder in my spare time, and was not disappointed.

For those who are not familar with Ibsen, his plays are studies of human interaction and psychology, and this collection slants towards the tragic (meaning that it's not quite over until someone dies). There's certain patterns readers will notice, how characters lives are inter-connected by past secrets or relations they haven't been quite honest about, and how a character's unfulfilled life is linked to past actions and someone else's meddling hand. But it's all very compelling, and once you've gotten the names straight and how everyone is related to each other, you're sucked into the drama of these lives.

Of course if you don't like your modern drama depressing then this might not be for you. But any serious playwright/drama student needs to read Ibsen, and this is a fine place to start.

Engrossing!
Ibsen is one of the most important playwrights to ever grace this earth, and it is not difficult to see why after reading this collection of plays. "The Doll House" is immediately fascinating, perhaps the easiest to understand out of this group of plays. It teaches the lesson that one must learn to stand on one's own, to carry out the cliché -- "to find oneself" -- but the lesson is not learned by the main character until the stage has been skillfully set in order to make the ending all the more compelling. The strongest play is perhaps "Hedda Gabler," whose upper class heroine, Hedda, is one of the most abstract and intriguing female characters ever written for a play. Devious and suffocating in her new middle class surroundings after marrying a rather dull man, her frustrations play out and alienate the other characters. The other characters are not merely accessories; they ARE the play when one juxtaposes them with Hedda. "The Wild Duck" is not as strong a play, and the dullest of the group, but is also worth a read. Overall, the collection is a quick and engrossing read.

Hedda Gabler
Hedda gabler is a tale of a woman in the victorian ages. She was recently married to a man who considered writing a book "The Brabant in the middle ages" an exiting topic. She is torn between the role she must portray and the role she wants. The play shows the fall from grace and the decline of Hedda Gablers power. It is a powerful play and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Anyone who read the play and wants to help me with a staging essay.amieDicaprio@yahoo.com ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Amazing collection, great translation, great extras...
There will not be a better collected edition of these plays in English translation.For both casual readers and scholars unable to read Ibsen in the original Norwegian, Rolf Fjelde's translation and supplementary materials make this volume unbeatable.

Fjelde presents Ibsen's major prose plays (which leaves out, of course, beauties like "Peer Gynt" but includes "A Doll House," "Ghosts," "An Enemy of the People," and "Hedda Gabler," among others) in fresh new translations, often altering standard misuses.He explains, for example, that traditional renderings of "Et dukkehjem" as "A Doll's House" warp its real meaning, which is simply "A Doll House."Pedantic as it may appear, this care is necessary, and evident throughout.

Even better are the almost 100 pages of extras: detailed introductions to each play, as well as minutely researched production histories.Who knew, for example, that "Ghosts" premiered not in Denmark or Norway but...Chicago, in 1882?The production notes and introduction to the volume tell a story we don't often hear about Ibsen, a tale of difficulties in Scandinavia, followed by years of exile and, ultimately, international acclaim.Reading the plays, which seem to have become more and more specifically Norwegian in setting and theme while Ibsen himself became more and more cosmopolitan, conjures memories of another exile who only ever wrote about home: James Joyce, not coincidentally one of Ibsen's greatest admirers.

For the price, you can't do better for English translations of these pieces--many of which can't be found elsewhere--whether you're a scholar in need of the historical context Fjelde obligingly provides, or simply interested in plowing through some of the foundations of 20th century and contemporary drama.

A Nordic chill
These twelve plays, written in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ibsen himself often referred to as a cycle. Each is complete in itself, but regarded together, they form a remarkable artistic achievement.

Theearlier works in the cycle achieved notoriety because of their themes,which were considered daring in those days. Nowadays, we can view theseworks with a greater objectivity. It is clear that Ibsen was stilldeveloping what was then a relatively new form - the realistic prose drama;and there are elements - e.g. the attempted blackmail and interceptedletter in "A Doll's House" - where we may still see remnants ofthe older type of melodrama from which Ibsen was attempting to break out.But they are very fine plays nonetheless, dealing with the individual'srelationship with the wider society. Ibsen always remained aware of theextent to which human characters are moulded by the society they inhabit,but from "Rosmersholm" onwards, he focussed more on thecharacters' inner lives. He also found ways of saying more with less: hislater plays are so concentrated, that not a word, not a gesture, isirrelevant.

Instead of re-using old myths, like Wagner or Joyce in theirfields, Ibsen creates myths of his own: the white horses of Rosmersholm,for example, or the Master Builder who had defied God, but who dares notclimb as high as he builds. A powerful poetic imagination is apparent inthese plays, filling them with images of unforgettable intensity. The lastplay, "When We Dead Awaken", appears in part to forsake therealistic drama that Ibsen had so painstakingly developed, and return tothe world of those earlier poetic masterpieces, "Brand" and"Peer Gynt".

"Hedda Gabler", "The MasterBuilder", "Little Eyolf", "John Gabriel Borkman" -these late plays are worthy to stand alongside the tragic masterpieces ofShakespeare or the Greeks. But a Nordic chill runs through them.

Thereare distinguished translations by, amongst others, Michael Meyer (Methuen),Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts (Penguin), and here, usefully collected inone volume, by Rolf Fjelde. They all bring out different aspects of theseworks, and they are all eminently readable. (Having seen many of thesetranslations in various performances, they also work well on stage.) UntilI learn Norwegian to read these works in the original, these translationswill have pride of place on my shelves. ... Read more

Book Description
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the founder of modern theater, and his plays are performed all over the world. Yet in spite of his unquestioned status as a classic of the stage, Ibsen is often dismissed as a boring old realist, whose plays are of interest only because they remain the gateway to modern theater. In Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Toril Moi makes a powerful case not just for Ibsen's modernity, but also for his modernism.Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism situates Ibsen in his cultural context, emphasizes his position as a Norwegian in European culture, and shows how important painting and other visual arts were for his aesthetic education. The book rewrites literary history, reminding modern readers that idealism was the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the nineteenth century. Modernism was born in the ruins of idealism, Moi argues, thus challenging traditional theories of the opposition between realism and modernism. By reading Ibsen's modernist plays as investigations of the fate of love in an age of skepticism, Moi shows why Ibsen still matters to us. In this book, Ibsen's plays are showed to be profoundly concerned by theater and theatricality, both on stage and in everyday life. Ibsen's unsettling explorations of women, men, and marriage here emerge as chronicles of the tension between skepticism and the everyday, and between critique and utopia in modernity.This radical new account places Ibsen in his rightful place alongside Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Manet as a founder of European modernism. ... Read more

Book Description
Ibsen's poetry has not until now been widely accessible in translation, which is remarkable considering that several of the poems are closely related to his famous plays. Northam, an eminent Ibsen scholar, offers versions of the 1899 edition of Ibsen's Poems, as well as his Selected Poems
1848-72, published in 1902.Professor Northam's sensitive translations reproduce the metrical form of Ibsen's originals and he provides extensive commentary in the form of headnotes for each poem and an introduction which relates Ibsen's works to their historic and literary context. ... Read more

Book Description
Ibsen's letters, extending over a period of more than fifty years, provide us with a direct presentment of the man during the changing conditions of his life and friendships, and contain much of both biographical and literary interest, that has never before been made public. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

great plays from a great author
I first picked up a copy of Ibsen while searching through my parents' bookshelf for something to read; after zipping through 'A Doll House' I knew I was hooked.All of Ibsen's (late) plays are amazing in that they adhere to a strict structure - always set in Norway (even though Ibsen lived all around Europe) in a small town and, with the exception of 'The Wild Duck,' have a similarly bittersweet ending - but are nevertheless full of brute and honest emotions and characters who are incredibly multi-dimensional, all within about 100 pages per play.

These four plays are no doubt among Ibsen's best.'Ghosts' deals with disease of the body and the spirit in the Alving family, while 'The Lady from the Sea' is comparable to 'Hedda Gabler' in its strong feminism: the main character Ellida demands the right to choose her own future.In 'John Gabriel Borkman' the title character comes down from self-imposed confinment in the attic of his house to begin his life again.

However, my favorite has to be 'An Enemy of the People', which is one of the most powerful indictments of bourgeois democratic politics I've ever read.Those interested in such nineteenth-century philosophers as Kierkegaard or Nietzsche would particularly enjoy this play, since Ibsen strongly denounces the idea that the will of the majority is always right.While the American film of the play was not that good, there's a reason it was made in the first place: 'Enemy' might be the most relevant of all of Ibsen's plays to contemporary society (and I thought that even before the 2000 election!).While you might not agree with the sentiments of the main character, Dr. Stockmann, his ideas will provoke a reaction one way or the other, I promise you.

Finally, the book also contains a lengthy and informative foreword by the translator Rolf Fjelde.

Excellent - must read!
I was forced to read all of Ibsen's work as part of an english degree but, unlike the wordy and old-fashioned prose of books like "Anna Karenina" or "Middlemarch", Ibsen was a refreshing break - with his down-to-earth, probable, moving and tragically realistic plays that are relevent even in modern society. I especially recommend "Ghosts" - although if you like the corny "resolve everything" endings of Hollywood, this tragic and open-ended play is not for you! For readers who like to guess their own ending, get "Ghosts" right now!!

An Enemy of the People--an astute examination of politics
Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" is not dull and unmoving; it characterizes the machinations of small-town politicos in a way that parallels many "democratic" examples we have around us today (in 1998 America, that is).Predictable at times, Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann provides the reader with a perfect candidate for this tragic affair:he is an idealist through and through, and readers know Ibsen is speaking from actual life experience."An Enemy of the People" is therapeutic for anyone who has been stung by things political, and enlightening for those lucky enough to have avoided that sting.

Easy as can be, boring as can be.
Henrik Ibsen has made the perfect book for a bookreview.In play form and right around a hundredpages, AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE is boring and isalmost impossible to get into.Unless you needsomething at the last minute, all you lazy teens,I do not recommend. (JGD) ... Read more

Book Description
The translations, created through a fresh approach to theNorwegian original in tandem with a keen sense of Ibsen's theatricallityand playability, have all been tested and refined in productions atprofessional theaters.

The translators have paid particular attention to three aspects of Ibsen'stechnique: his wit and humor, his "supertext" - the web of rich allusionsand references that he weaves in and around his dialogue - and the boldtheatricallity of the plays. The result is an Ibsen that soundscontemporary without being slangy or colloquial - an Ibsen of strong ideasbut also living characters - and surprisingly different from the image ofthe cold, forbidding "scold of the North" that we often associate with thisgiant writer. ... Read more