The Self-Regarding Comedy of the Contemporary British Stage
Harbin, Leigh Joyce
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81492
Description
Title
The Self-Regarding Comedy of the Contemporary British Stage
Author(s)
Harbin, Leigh Joyce
Issue Date
1998
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
James Hurt
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Theater
Language
eng
Abstract
Through detailed analysis of individual plays I examine how these playwrights alter and update stock characters and boy-meets-girl plots, and how they move away from traditional exposition and neatly resolved linear plotlines. Their comedies rework the romantic hero and heroine, and other stock characters. Their works may end unhappily, or simply stop without providing the explanations and resolutions associated with the traditional comic ending. Similarly, they may use oblique, cryptic, or densely layered language rather than the straightforward language typically associated with comedy. They write comedies about such unusual subjects as the connection between gender roles and colonialism (Churchill's Cloud Nine), Chaos theory and English nineteenth-century landscape gardening (Stoppard's Arcadia) or a woman experiencing a complete mental breakdown (Ayckbourn's Woman In Mind). Though these subjects seem too cerebral or too grim to be funny, the plays in fact do produce laughter, but this laughter cannot be explained In traditional terms as either celebratory or corrective. Through heavily parodic and Ironic use of comic elements and a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, the self-regarding comedy of the late twentieth-century British stage forces us to redefine and update our definitions of comedy.
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