Download Free The Feminist Voices In Restoration Comedy Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Feminist Voices In Restoration Comedy and write the review.

Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley and William Congreve introduce into their play-worlds major female characters who demand independence and equality from their male counterparts. This book focuses on each major female character who demands independence and equality of her gallant-libertine before she will commit to marriage or courtship with him. This demand for equality is a contrast to the social and marital relationships found in the real world of 17th century English Restoration society where marriage was a bargaining process for property and where the woman was treated as the man's property. Each of the three playwrights develops his virtuous women in a different way. Wycherley's approach to his characters, for instance, is quite different from that of Etherege and Congreve. But in each case, the playwrights present major female characters who prove themselves superior in wit and wisdom and thoroughly modern in their outlook.
This book introduces students to drama from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the early 18th Century. Susan Owen offers representative coverage of new forms of drama in this period, and of ways in which old forms are altered. Her study covers heroic drama, comedy, tragedy, tragi-comedy, and Shakespeare adaptations, by focusing on specific 'dramatic highlights' and giving close reading of particular plays.
Jane Austen and Co. explores the ways in which classical novels—particularly, but not exclusively, those of Jane Austen—have been transformed into artifacts of contemporary popular culture. Examining recent films, television shows, Internet sites, and even historical tours, the book turns from the question of Austen's contemporary appeal to a broader consideration of other late-twentieth-century remakes, including Dangerous Liaisons, Dracula, Lolita, and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Taken together, the essays in Jane Austen and Co. offer a wide-ranging model for understanding how all of these texts—visual, literary, touristic, British, American, French—reshape the past in the new fashions, styles, media, and desires of the present. Contributors include Virginia L. Blum, Mike Crang, Madeline Dobie, Denise Fulbrook, Deidre Lynch, Sarah Maza, Ruth Perry, Suzanne R. Pucci, Kristina Straub, James Thompson, Maureen Turim, and Martine Voiret.
Coyness and Crime examines the extraordinary focus on feminine coyness in forty English comedies by ten diverse playwrights of the late seventeenth-century. In contexts ranging from reaffirmations of church and king to emerging interests in liberty and novelty, these plays consistently reveal women caught in an ironic and nearly intractable convergence of objectification and culpability that allows them little innocent sexual agency; this is both the source and the legacy of coyness in Restoration comedy.
Fourteen specially commissioned essays provide essential information about staging, playwrights, themes and genres in the drama of the Restoration.
Studies of the representation and understanding of drink and conviviality in diverse social contexts.
Etherege & Wycherley is the first book-length study devoted solely to these two leading comic dramatists of the early Restoration period. B.A. Kachur explores the major plays by George Etherege and William Wycherley within the context of the cultural, social and political changes that marked the reign of Charles II, and addresses issues such as marriage, manners, heroism, sovereignty and anxieties over class hierarchies which preoccupied late seventeenth-century England. The book provides studies of the following plays: - She Would If She Could - The Man of Mode - The Country Wife - The Plain Dealer In addition to examining the plays as cultural and historical texts, Kachur offers: - Biographical sketches detailing the dramaturgical styles of the two playwrights - An overview of Charles II's reign, including its effects on the dramatic literature of the era - A survey of Carolean theatre and drama outlining innovations in staging, and major dramatic genres - Performance histories which illuminate the ways in which twentieth-century directors have interpreted the comedies to make them accessible to modern audiences
One-stop resource offering complete textbook for courses in seventeenth-century literature - progressing from introductory topics through to overviews of current research.
This unique anthology presents a selection of over seventy of the most important historical essays on comedy, ranging from antiquity to the present, divided into historical periods and arranged chronologically. Across its span it traces the development of comic theory, highlighting the relationships between comedy, politics, economics, philosophy, religion, and other arts and genres. Students of literature and theatre will find this collection an invaluable and accessible guide to writing from Plato and Aristotle through to the twenty-first century, in which special attention has been paid to writings since the start of the twentieth century. Reader in Comedy is arranged in five sections, each featuring an introduction providing concise and informed historical and theoretical frameworks for the texts from the period: * Antiquity and the Middle Ages * The Renaissance * Restoration to Romanticism * The Industrial Age * The Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Among the many authors included are: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Donatus, Dante Alighieri, Erasmus, Trissino, Sir Thomas Elyot, Thomas Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Battista Guarini, Molière, William Congreve, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Jean Paul Richter, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Baudelaire, Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Henri Bergson, Constance Rourke, Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georges Bataille, Simon Critchley and Michael North. As the selection demonstrates, from Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, comedy has attracted the attention of serious thinkers. Bringing together diverse theories of comedy from across the ages, the Reader reveals that, far from being peripheral, comedy speaks to the most pragmatic aspects of human life.