Peer Gynt - FIRST EDITION (1936)

Published by Harrap. 1936, hardcover,  large format, brown cloth with gilt lettering and vignettes255 pages,  wraparound Rackham illustration (not featured elsewhere} on dustjacket, pictorial endpapers with Rackham designs in silhouette, twelve colour plates under captioned tissue guards, and many small line drawings, dustjacket has some wear to edges and brodart jacket protector, overall condition: very good.

The illustrator, Arthur Rackham, often depicted fantasy and fairy tale subjects. He contributed illustrations to many popular stories, such as "Cinderella", "Sleeping Beauty", "Alice in Wonderland", and the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. Known for his ability to produce both eerie, almost feral trees, goblins, and assorted other ne'er-do-wells while at the same time bringing to life breathtakingly lovely fairies, princesses, and good children, all brought to life.

Peer Gynt  by Henrik Ibsen is one of Ibsen's best known and most widely performed plays. Peer Gynt chronicles the journey of its title character from the Norwegian mountains to the North African desert and back. According to Klaus Van Den Berg, "its origins are Romantic, but the play also anticipates the fragmentations of emerging modernism" and the "cinematic script blends poetry with social satire and realistic scenes with surreal ones." Peer Gynt has also been described as the story of a life based on procrastination and avoidance.

Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt in deliberate disregard of the limitations that the conventional stagecraft of the 19th century imposed on drama. Its forty scenes move uninhibitedly in time and space and between consciousness and the unconscious, blending folkloric fantasy and unsentimental realism. Raymond Williams compares Peer Gynt with August Strindberg's early drama Lucky Peter's Journey (1882) and argues that both explore a new kind of dramatic action that was beyond the capacities of the theatre of the day; both created "a sequence of images in language and visual composition" that "became technically possible only in film."