Buchtheater Buchkatalog

Books are often interpreted, produced and received as theatre - not only compendia of knowledge but also books with literary texts. Those literary works in particular which conceptually incorporate the design of the book as a physical object align well with the concepts and varieties of theatre. In the sphere of popular culture playbooks are presented as settings analogous to the theatre, artists' books stage literary texts while emphasising their affinity with theatre. This study examines many aspects of the productive impulses generated in literature by the concept of the book as theatre on the basis of numerous examples and with reference to the major contextual relationships between literary and theatrical history. Topics covered include typography as an art of visually staging a text, the codex and its movable parts as a space for play, the modelling of symbolic and verbal worlds through the book as a stage with its actors and performances - and the study repeatedly returns to the theatre of the mind, the stage of the imagination. A central theme is the staging of tensions between verbal and visual dimensions of the literary work and the interaction between text and image.