Download or read book Comedy of Manners written by David L. Hirst and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1979, this book traces comedy of manners from the 1660s to the then present — a scope beyond the traditional focus on the Restoration and early twentieth century. It uncovers an underestimated subversive potential and socially critical force in this particularly English dramatic form, emphasising the distinctive subjects and style that distinguish it from more general forms of witty social satire. The author discusses the major comic dramatists of the post-Restoration period; reassesses the significance of Sheridan, Wilde and Coward; and examines the continuation of the tradition in modern writers. This book will be of interest to students of English literature and drama.
Download or read book The Comedy of Manners written by John Palmer and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Interpreting Ladies written by Pat Gill and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting Ladies explores the defense by the Restoration comedy of manners of an ideal of aristocratic, conservative, English masculinity against the heavily satirized encroachments of French foppishness and the pretensions of the aspiring merchant class. Using Freud's theory of obscene wit, in which obscene jokes become reassuring testimonies of male privilege, as well as more recent theoretical descriptions of the discursive processes of meaning and desire, Gill considers the position of both the female protagonists and the female spectators in Restoration satire. She sketches the historical events and issues that create the link between morality and rhetoric and that serve to connect each to class and status. Gill posits that the moral indeterminacy and slippage in satiric language is closely linked to male uneasiness about female honesty, and the dramatists' arguments in defense of their satiric treatments of female hypocrisy, duplicity, and sexual desire expose the gap in the moral premise of Restoration comic satire. It is a gap, Gill contends, that has everything to do with women - with female characters and putative female spectators - and it is why she states that "any reading that proposes to account for the equivocal satiric practice of Restoration comedy must therefore of necessity include a feminist critique".
Download or read book Marriage A La Mode written by John Dryden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-06-13 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dryden's audiences in 1671, both aristocratic and middle-class, would have been quick to respond to the themes of disputed royal succession, Francophilia and loyalty among subjects in his most successful tragicomedy. In the tragic plot, written in verse, young Leonidas has to struggle to assert his place as the rightful heir to the throne of Sicily and to the hand of the usurper's daughter. In the comic plot, written in prose, two fashionable couples (much more at home in London drawing-rooms than at the Sicilian court) play at switching partners in the 'modern' style. The introduction of this edition argues that Dryden's own ambivalence about King Charles and his entourage, on whom he came to rely more on more for patronage, manifests itself in both plots; most of all perhaps in the excessively Francophile Melantha, whose affectation cannot quite hide her endearing joie-de-vivre.
Download or read book The Contrast written by Cynthia A. Kierner and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Contrast“, which premiered at New York City's John Street Theater in 1787, was the first American play performed in public by a professional theater company. The play, written by New England-born, Harvard-educated, Royall Tyler was timely, funny, and extremely popular. When the play appeared in print in 1790, George Washington himself appeared at the head of its list of hundreds of subscribers. Reprinted here with annotated footnotes by historian Cynthia A. Kierner, Tyler’s play explores the debate over manners, morals, and cultural authority in the decades following American Revolution. Did the American colonists' rejection of monarchy in 1776 mean they should abolish all European social traditions and hierarchies? What sorts of etiquette, amusements, and fashions were appropriate and beneficial? Most important, to be a nation, did Americans need to distinguish themselves from Europeans—and, if so, how? Tyler was not the only American pondering these questions, and Kierner situates the play in its broader historical and cultural contexts. An extensive introduction provides readers with a background on life and politics in the United States in 1787, when Americans were in the midst of nation-building. The book also features a section with selections from contemporary letters, essays, novels, conduct books, and public documents, which debate issues of the era.
Download or read book This Much Huxley Knows written by Gail Aldwin and published by . This book was released on 2021-07-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seven-year-old Huxley searches for a best friend but life is confusing when he doesn't know who is trustworthy.
Download or read book Restoration Comedy in Performance written by J. L. Styan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-08-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the ways in which Restoration comedy was performed, using the costume, customs, manners and behaviour of the age as a way of understanding its theatre and drama. It also considers problems encountered in early twentieth century revivals of plays by authors such as Etherege, Dryden, Congreve and Farquhar.
Download or read book Shelter in Place written by David Leavitt and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Very funny and unexpected, a material response to our times, plush as velvet.” –Rachel Cusk “A wickedly funny and emotionally expansive novel about all the bewildering ways we seek solace from the people and things that surround us.” – Jenny Offill David Leavitt returns with his signature “coolly elegant prose” (O, The Oprah Magazine) to deliver a comedy of manners for the Trump era. It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva's husband, Bruce-the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva's challenge. Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair. A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped.
Download or read book The Comedy of Manners written by Kenneth Muir and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, this title starts with an introduction, in which Professor Muir distinguishes between the Comedy of Manners and other types of comedy and traces its origins in English and French literature, there are then chapters on the major writers – Etherege, Dryden, Wycherly, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar – and on Jeremy Collier’s attack on the immorality and profaneness of the plays. This is followed by a discussion of the reasons for the decline of comedy in the eighteenth century and an account of its revival by Sheridan and, belatedly, by Wilde. Professor Muir takes issue with a number of recent critics on the dramatic value of the plays.
Download or read book Design for Living written by Noël Coward and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.' Design for Living is a wickedly witty dark romantic comedy by Noel Coward. Initially banned in the UK, this provocative play portrays three amoral, glib and stylish characters and their hopelessly inescapable, if also unconventional, emotional entanglement. From 1930s bohemian Paris to the dizzying heights of Manhattan society, a tempestuous love triangle unravels between a vivacious interior designer, Gilda, playwright Leo and artist Otto - three people unashamedly and passionately in love with each other. They are trapped in what Coward called 'a three-sided erotic hodge podge.' With Coward's trademark piquant style, this lively, funny but also atypical play looks at dazzling, egotistical creatures and their self-destructive dependence on each other. Exploring themes of bisexuality, celebrity, success and self-obsession, Design for Living is a stylish and scandalous comedy.
Download or read book The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy written by Adam Zucker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of wit, witlessness and social and comic conventions in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson and their contemporaries.
Download or read book ENGLISH SOURCES OF RESTORATION COMEDY OF MANNERS written by KATHLEEN MARTHA LYNCH and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Comedy of Manners from Sheridan to Maugham written by Newell W. Sawyer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two centuries between the first performance of The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the outbreak of the First World War, the stage provided an accurate mirror of the changing mores of English society. "High comedy," Newell W. Sawyer writes, "views man as a social animal in the midst of his fellows, with customs, conventions, and traditions of his own devising, and prods him gently or mockingly, as he stands confounded by that which he has made." The comedy of manners became, from its prototype, a dramatic category reflecting the life, thought, and manners of upper-class society, faithful to its traditions and philosophy, and as such offers an ideal medium for such a study as Professor Sawyer has here undertaken. The result is a book that is at once entertaining and serious, a study of two centuries of the British stage,
Download or read book The Importance of Being Earnest written by Oscar Wilde and published by First Avenue Editions ™. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Worthing gets antsy living at his country estate. As an excuse, he spins tales of his rowdy brother Earnest living in London. When Jack rushes to the city to confront his "brother," he's free to become Earnest and live a different lifestyle. In London, his best friend, Algernon, begins to suspect Earnest is leading a double life. Earnest confesses that his real name is Jack and admits the ruse has become tricky as two women have become enchanted with the idea of marrying Earnest. On a whim, Algernon also pretends to be Earnest and encounters the two women as they meet at the estate. With two Earnests who aren't really earnest and two women in love with little more than a name, this play is a classic comedy of errors. This is an unabridged version of Oscar Wilde's English play, first published in 1899.
Download or read book Every Man in His Humour written by Ben Jonson and published by . This book was released on 1822 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The way of the world written by William Congreve and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The comical revenge or Love in a tub a comedy by sir G Etherege written by George Etherege and published by . This book was released on 1669 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
