Ghosts and Other Plays
Penguin Publishing Group · Paperback · June 30, 1964
The plays in this volume focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them.
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- Who it’s for
- These plays make private loyalties and public truths equally uneasy to sit with.
- Themes
- Family deception, Hypocrisy and immorality, Public accountability
- Genres
- European Plays, Scandinavian Literary Collections
Nearest books
Matched by what the books are about, then ordered by what their readers also loved. Most of these share its genre: Scandinavian Literary Collections.
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The plays in this volume focus on the family and how it struggles to stay together by telling lies - and exposing them. In "Ghosts", Osvald Alving returns home only to discover the truth about the father he always looked up to, and learns the horrific effect his father's debauchery has had on him. It was Ibsen's most provocative drama, stripping away the surface of a middle-class family to expose layers of hypocrisy and immorality.
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"A Public Enemy" sets two brothers against each other when one wishes to make public the facts about the polluted water in the public baths of their home town. And "When We Dead Wake" tells of an artist meeting an old lover by chance and rejecting his wife, in a symbolic exploration of Ibsen's own literary life and the sacrifices he made in his work. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Truth Under Pressure
These plays make private loyalties and public truths equally uneasy to sit with.
Come here for
- Family ties strained by lies and hypocrisy
- Conflicts where telling the truth carries a cost
Expect
- Three dramas with sharply different kinds of reckoning
- A clear-eyed look at respectability, sacrifice, and moral compromise
Where it sits
| Scandinavian Literary Collections | 72% |
|---|---|
| European Plays | 49% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- European Plays
- Scandinavian Literary Collections
- Scandinavian Literary Criticism
- Authors
- Henrik Ibsen
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- June 30, 1964
- Format
- Paperback
- Theme
- Family deception · Hypocrisy and immorality · Public accountability
- Reading lane
- European Plays