This dissertation demonstrates that twentieth-century dramas by Sean O'Casey, John Osborne, and Harold Pinter continue the convention of nineteenth-century domestic drama. From the expressionist movement, theatre of the absurd, and theatre of anger, to the theatre of extremes, diverse theatrical experiments in the twentieth century urged critics to focus on the contemporary theatrical effort to break away from convention. Consequently, critics have often emphasized the disconnectedness of the twentieth-century avant-garde theatre from nineteenth-century conventions, especially from the tradition of the well-made drawing room drama. My thesis focuses on the trajectory of the nineteenth-century domestic melodrama. Despite the seeming disconnection, nineteenth-century domestic melodrama still lurks within political theatre in the twentieth century as a cultural inheritance. This study argues that the aforementioned twentieth-century playwrights participate in political critique through the discourse of domesticity. Despite the geographical and temporal differences, the characters in the plays all struggle in the absence of communal integrity or national consensus. They suffer from war trauma, from disillusioned nationhood, from abuses of power, and from fascist violence. In addressing the fractured nationhood, these playwrights reference the Victorian perceptions of the home, the mother, and the nation. While the Victorian discourse of domesticity celebrated the idea of the home as a non-material, sacred haven and admired female virtue in support of patriarchal/national stability, Victorian domestic dramas displayed the anxieties surrounding domesticity. This dissertation examines how the twentieth-century plays considered here enhance the vision of late nineteenth-century domestic drama and exploit the myths of the home, the woman and the nation. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [235]-262).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [235]-262).

The dissertation reappraises Thomas Dekker's dramatic achievement through an examination of his contribution to the development of Elizabethan-Jacobean domestic drama. Dekker's alterations and modifications of two essential features of early English domestic drama--the homiletic pattern of sin, punishment, and repentance, which the genre inherited from the morality tradition, and the glorification of the cult of domesticity--attest to a complex moral and dramatic vision which critics have generally ignored. In Patient Grissil, his earliest extant domestic play, which portrays ambivalently the vicissitudes of marital and family life, Dekker combines an allegorical superstructure with a realistic setting. The tension between homiletic and realistic impulses is also at the heart of The Honest Whore. In Part I, although Dekker provides a trenchant portrait of the afflicted domus, the play's satirical tone clashes oddly with the homiletic schemes. In Part II, however, the marriage code is presented amid intricate plotting and a complex ethical design in which orthodox homiletic paradigms such as the patient wife, the testing of the wife's virtue, and the prodigal husband's reformation are consistently undermined through irony and paradox. Taken as a whole, these three plays reveal Dekker's growing cynicism toward the tidy moral and dramatic schemes of their analogues, and of the treatises and domestic-conduct books from which domestic dramas took their plots. Dekker's skillful exploitation of homiletic motifs extends to the comic vision of The Roaring Girl. The play sustains a central tension between the domus and the city, and offers a bold portrait of the heroine, Moll Cutpurse, who scorns marriage, preferring the openness of the city to the confinement of the household. In Dekker's domestic tragedy, The Witch of Edmonton, written shortly after his lengthy imprisonment for debt, the comic optimism that informs The Roaring Girl yields to bitter tones and to the defeat by a repressive society of those protagonists who openly challenge the values imbedded in the marriage code. The conclusion surveys the development of domestic drama since the Renaissance, and shows how Dekker anticipates the domestic plays of modern dramatists such as Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O'Neill. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

Texte remanié de : Dissertation : Romanistik : Universität München : 1983. / Bibliogr. p. [383]-389.

No description available.

In this thesis an attempt will be made to trace briefly the development of the domestic tragedy of blood on the English stage to the end of the first decade of the seventeenth century.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-288).