Digital humanities has opened up new avenues for Ibsen scholarship, and recent developments within the field of e-research methodologies have formed a point of departure for questioning conventional assumptions. This book explores the early reception of Ibsen on the German stage from a quantitative angle using the performance database IbsenStage as a research tool. Visualization techniques are adopted as a means to prepare data for analysis and identify the major patterns in the production history, and data interrogation methodology is used to trigger new lines of enquiry. The study sheds new light on the greatest enigma of the early German reception of Ibsen: What caused A Dolls House, the play that eventually propelled Ibsen into global fame, to fail so blatantly on the German stage at the beginning of the 1880s, after the resounding success of Pillars of Society? Initially, Ibsen was treated as a commercial playwright. This changed in the late 1880s, when Ghosts was embraced by the avant-garde. At the same time, Ibsen was reintroduced as a commercially viable playwright, and it was only then that Ibsen began to have a lasting impact on the German stage.weiterlesen