Bookshelf
| can't find it |

| browse books |
puppets & puppetry
 

| book details |

Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life

By (author) Kenneth Gross





This book is currently unavailable. Enquire to check if we can source a used copy


| book description |

The puppet creates delight and fear. It may evoke the innocent play of childhood, or become a tool of ritual magic, able to negotiate with ghosts and gods. Puppets can be creepy things, secretive, inanimate while also full of spirit, alive with gesture and voice. In this eloquent book, Kenneth Gross contemplates the fascination of these unsettling objects - objects that are also actors and images of life. The poetry of the puppet is central here, whether in its blunt grotesquery or symbolic simplicity, and always in its talent for metamorphosis. On a meditative journey to seek the idiosyncratic shapes of puppets on stage, Gross looks at the anarchic Punch and Judy show, the sacred shadow theater of Bali, and experimental theaters in Europe and the United States, where puppets enact everything from Baroque opera and Shakespearean tragedy to Beckettian farce. Throughout, he interweaves accounts of the myriad faces of the puppet in literature - Collodi's cruel, wooden Pinocchio, puppet-like characters in Kafka and Dickens, Rilke's puppet-angels, the dark puppeteering of Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath - as well as in the work of artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Klee. The puppet emerges here as a hungry creature, seducer and destroyer, demon and clown. It is a test of our experience of things, of the human and inhuman. A book about reseeing what we know, or what we think we know, ""Puppet"" evokes the startling power of puppets as mirrors of the uncanny in life and art.

| product details |



Normally shipped | Enquiries only
Publisher | The University of Chicago Press
Published date | 3 Oct 2012
Language |
Format | Paperback / softback
Pages | 216
Dimensions | 22 x 14 x 2mm (L x W x H)
Weight | 284g
ISBN | 978-0-2260-0550-8
Readership Age |
BISAC | performing arts / puppets & puppetry


| other options |


| your trolley |

To view the items in your trolley please sign in.

| sign in |

| specials |

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes

William Kelleher Storey
Paperback / softback
528 pages
was: R 425.95
now: R 382.95
Usually dispatched in 6-12 days

This first comprehensive biography of Cecil Rhodes in a generation illuminates Rhodes’s vision for the expansion of imperialism in southern Africa, connecting politics and industry to internal development, and examines how this fueled a lasting, white-dominated colonial society.

The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future

Mustafa Suleyman
Paperback / softback
352 pages
was: R 295.95
now: R 265.95
Stock is usually dispatched in 6-12 days from date of order


Survive the AI Apocalypse: A guide for solutionists

Bronwen Williams
Paperback / softback
232 pages
was: R 340.95
now: R 306.95
Forthcoming

Let's stare the future down and, instead of fearing AI, become solutionists.

The Memory Collectors: A Novel

Dete Meserve
Paperback / softback
320 pages


Enquiries only