Description

The essays and reflections in this collection explore the seriousness of play and the mysteries of inanimate life – the unknown spaces, noises, dust, lost objects, and small animals that fill any house – which have provoked many writers to take the side of these dead or non-human things, resulting in some of the most profound passages in literature. On Dolls includes contributions from: Heinrich Von Kleist On the Marionette Theatre , Charles Baudelaire The Philosophy of Toys , Sigmund Freud The Uncanny , Rainer Maria Rilke On the Dolls of Lotte Pritzel , Franz Kafka The Cares of a Family Man , Bruno Schulz Tailors Dummies , Walter Benjamin Old Toys: The Toy Exhibition at the Markisches Museum , Elizabeth Bishop Cirque d Hiver , Dennis Silk The Marionette Theatre , Marina Warner On the Threshold: Sleeping Beauties. Kenneth Gross is particularly illuminating about the passionate intensity or violent hunger for being that seems to be the particular characteristic of puppets; it is as though, as the fossilised form of human longing, the puppet longs in turn, vividly and vivaciously, for the life that can never be its own.

Steven Connor on Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life