An Ibsen Course
by Brian Johnston

    Romanticism to Realism is based on a graduate course taught in the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall  of 2006.  It now joins my website offered to readers as a source of information, suggestion and controversy. 

      My hope is the material proves valuable for students and teachers of drama, and to Ibsen enthusiasts who want to gain a deeper understanding of dramatic art through a structured close analysis of a major dramatist''s work.  The focus will be on Ibsen's evolving dramatic artistry.

    Material will be added in the future and the many typos created by rushing weekly essays for classes onto the site will gradually be corrected.  To get the most from the material you are encouraged to have access to critical texts by the author which are referred to continually in the series of critical essays and class notes that follow.  I cite my own texts because, after more than thirty years since The Ibsen Cycle, Ibsen scholars still ignore his own account of his plays as a 'Cycle' with "mutual connections between the plays" that should "be read in the order in which they were written."

   A less egocentric bibliography, however, can be found at the end of Ibsen's Selected Plays, the Norton volume referred to below.