Opera offers a rich space in which to think about problems of mimesis—how artworks imitate ideal forms, how humans imitate the things around us, and how words attempt to represent reality.

In this book, musicologist and cultural historian Sarah Collins shows how the strange, exhilarating, and uniquely self-conscious art form of opera opens itself to such contemporary, theoretical questions. The Deathly Pleasures of Form is especially concerned with the links between linguistic and bodily signification in opera through the genre’s use of figures of partial agency—disembodied voices, enchanted objects, puppets, mechanical devices. The book is structured around four emblematic figures (Faust, Don Juan, Papageno, and Hoffmann) who are paired with four objects of variable animacy (puppet, stone, silhouette, and mirror, respectively). Across these chapters, Collins develops an expanded notion of mimesis that illuminates opera’s material and mechanical investments, its filmic and other adaptations, its explicit negotiation between vocal utterance and bodily gesture, and the epistemological significance of opera’s excesses. Ultimately, Collins claims that opera performs a type of compromised agency that can offer new critical insight into the self-limiting nature of both freedom and representation.