Issued also as the author's thesis, University of Chicago, 1903 (Dissertationes Americanae. English language and literature ; no. 1). / A free translation or adaptation of the Amphitruo of Plautus, increased nearly one-third by the addition of new matter, attributed to M. Slaughter. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1937. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 385-392).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2005. / Advisor: John Ferns. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 225-241). Also available via World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2005. / Thesis directed by Graham L. Hammill for the Department of English. "November 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 373-404).

Issued also as the author's thesis, University of Chicago, 1903 (Dissertationes Americanae. English language and literature ; no. 1). / A free translation or adaptation of the Amphitruo of Plautus, increased nearly one-third by the addition of new matter, attributed to M. Slaughter. Includes bibliographical references and index. Also available on the Internet.

This study of sixty-seven Restoration comedies demonstrates that the ethical system by which the comic playwrights distribute praise and blame to their characters is a contractual one: those characters who learn to respect contract--the social acknowledgment of another's equality and autonomy--are those who win the dramatic prizes, whether money or marriage. Those characters who attempt to subvert or pervert the contractual ethic, whether through ignorance or design, generally defeat their own aims. Critical opinion has not often favored this thesis because it assumes that contract and trust--the latter a quality many critics now see as important in these comedies--are mutually exclusive. But legal history and legal theory show instead that they are mutually dependent, that an act of trust is a priori an act of contract, and the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century provided the comic playwrights with ample reinforcement for this idea. Two of the three prerequisites for contract, agreement and consideration, take the same definition in comedy as in law. The third, however, constitutes the major difference between contracts in life and contracts in comedy: what the law calls identity or personality. This quality, explicitly defined in law, is less so in comedy, but it must nevertheless be present if we are to recognize any character as a responsible social being. Furthermore, that character must possess, in addition to this requisite identity, the awareness that personal contract--a private, self-enforcing agreement--is both ethically and practically superior to legal or illegal manipulation or force. Once possessed of both identity and a willingness to contract--of both individual and social integrity--that character earns the right to enjoy the emotional and material wealth which so happily rewards those upholding the comedies' moral vision, a moral vision that sees the contractual ethic as a testament to man's respect for and trust in his fellows.

Contemporary British plays are commonly thought of as political if they address an issue that is already seen as political (Kritzer, 2008). This thesis explores the idea that the political stance of a play is articulated at the level of its structure, as well as in its content. Contemporary playwriting practices in British theatre are dominated by ‘serious drama’. Serious drama yokes together politics, dialectical structure and a realist dramaturgy and the resultant form is held up as an ideal against which the political efficacy of a play can be judged. Through an application of the concept of the ideology of form (Jameson, 1981), this thesis re-reads the structures of serious drama in terms of how they reflect the social and economic structures of post- Fordism in their representation of spatio-temporal structures, causation in the dramatic narrative and their imagining of the social subject. Through this reading, this thesis problematises serious drama’s claim to a progressive socialist politics. In contrast, the experimental dramaturgies of a range of contemporary British plays (1997-2011) are read as mediating, negotiating and critiquing the social and economic structures of post-Fordism through their dramatic structure, and so articulating a potentially radical politics. Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire (1997), David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness (2005) and David Greig’s San Diego (2003) are read as negotiating the effects of spatio-temporal compression (Harvey, 1990). Mike Bartlett’s Contractions (2008), debbie tucker green’s Generations (2007) and Rupert Goold and Ben Power’s adaptation of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author are analysed in terms of their causal structures (Althusser, 1970). Finally Anthony Neilson’s Realism (2006), Simon Stephens’s Pornography (2007) and Mark Ravenhill’s Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat (2008) are investigated for the ways in which they re-imagine the social subject through subjective, narrative, unassigned and collective modes of characterisation.

Thesis (doctoral)--Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1907. / Cover title. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1926. / Without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [219]-231.