The Fantastic in the Plays of August Strindberg

In this brilliant study of the "fantastic" elements in the selected plays of the 19th century Swedish dramatist August Strindberg, young scholar Mariam Aisha Sherazi explores the psychological complexity and literary breath of Strindberg's dramatic oeuvre. In her words: "Strindberg’s imagination is capable of creating multiple and parallel imaginary worlds. He carries the audience from the physical world to the imaginary lands, which are drawn on parallel grounds with the former. The traditional perennial philosophy would call it mundus imaginalis and its precedents are found in the world literature, from the Biblical garden of Eden to the Platonic World of Ideas. In his dramatic works, boundaries of the real and imaginative lives are indistinct and inseparable. "