The subject of this dissertation is John Arden's dramaturgy. It covers the stage plays written by Arden (alone or with Margaretta D'Arcy) during their career in the "professional" theatre--that is, from The Waters of Babylon to and including The Island of the Mighty. It approaches them as one dramaturgically coherent opus and identifies and examines the basic artistic and cognitive emphases immanent to it. / The study explores two fundamental and related constitutive features of Arden's dramaturgy: diachronically, its adherence to the forms, conventions, and techniques of popular or traditional theatres, and synchronically, its radical political emphasis as expressed in a categorically plebeian and collectivistic bias. It begins by situating Arden in his time and his tradition, and then discusses how other significant choices of his--the emphasis on story-telling (Part 2), the supra-individual approach to dramaturgic agents (Part 3), and his ludic theatricality (Part 4)--flow out of and contribute to the consistency of his dramaturgy. Part 5 focuses on a detailed analysis of The Island of the Mighty. / Arden's rejection of the established bourgeois theatre with its illusionist character and individualist ideology and his orientation towards a dialectical show distinguishes his work from that of his English contemporaries. It can be linked to that radical alternative tradition in modern dramaturgy which culminates in Bertolt Brecht.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.71987 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Malick, Shah Jaweedul. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000221380, proquestno: AAINL20849, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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