Artaud and his doubles

Artaud and His Doubles is a radical re-thinking of one of the most well-known and influential theater artists and theorists of the twentieth century. Placing Artaud's works and rhetoric within the specific context of European political, theatrical, and intellectual history of the early twentieth century, the book reveals Artaud's affinities with a disturbing array of anti-intellectual and reactionary writers and artists whose ranks swelled catastrophically between the wars in Western Europe. Kimberly Jannarone shows that Artaud's work (particularly his famous 1938 manifesto, The Theater and Its Double) itself reveals two sets of doubles: one, a body of peculiarly persistent received interpretations from the American experimental theater and French post-structuralist readings of the 1960s; and, two, a darker set of doubles brought to light through close historical examination{u2014}those of Artaud's contemporaries who, in the tumultuous, alienated, and pessimistic atmosphere enveloping much of Europe after World War I, denounced the degradation of civilization, yearned for cosmic purification, and called for an ecstatic loss of the self.