New book by Mark Sandberg

Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny will be published by Cambridge University Press in March 2015. The book discusses Henrik Ibsen’s influence on public discourse at a pivotal moment in late nineteenth-century European modernity. His plays engaged his public through a strategic use of metaphors of house and home, which resonated with experiences of displacement, philosophical homelessness, and exile. The most famous of these metaphors – embodied by the titles of his plays A Doll’s House, Pillars of Society, and The Master Builder – have entered into mainstream Western thought in ways that mask the full force of the reversals Ibsen performed on notions of architectural space. Analyzing literary and performance-related reception materials from Ibsen’s lifetime, Ibsen’s Houses concentrates on the interior dramas of the playwright’s prose-play cycle, drawing also on his selected poems.