Aphra Behn: The Comedies

ISBN-13: 9780333963210 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 259 str.

Kate Aughterson

Opis

Aphra Behn: The Comedies provides students with an approachable and fascinating analysis of Behn's dramaturgical abilities, showing particularly how she uses comic and dramatic conventions to radical ends. Kate Aughterson shows how the playwright forces her audience to engage with issues about gender and sexuality, whilst continuing to write witty and accessible plays.

Spis treści

General Editor's Preface.- A Note on Editions.- Introduction.- PART ONE: ANALYSING BEHN'S COMEDIES.- Openings.- Endings.- Discovery Scenes.- Heroines and Whores.- Rakes and Gallants.- Doubled Plots.- Staging.- Carnival and Masquerade.- Politics and Society.- General Conclusions to Part One.- PART TWO: CONTEXTS AND CRITICS.- Behn's Literary Career.- Restoration Contexts.- Sample Critical Views and Performances.- Further Reading.- Index.

O autorze

KATE AUGHTERSON is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Central England. She is the author of Webster: The Tragedies, also in the Analysing Texts series.

Blurb

Kate Aughterson provides readers with an approachable and fascinating critical guide to the dramatic works of an important seventeenth-century woman writer. Aughterson analyses Aphra Behn's abilities as a playwright, showing particularly how she skillfully employs comic and dramatic conventions to radical ends, and how she forces her audience to engage with issues about gender and sexuality whilst retaining her witty and accessible style.

Chapters in the first part of the book provide close readings of the comedies, addressing such topics as openings, endings, character types, staging, and politics and society. In the second part, Aughterson not only examines Behn's literary career and the Restoration contexts of her plays, but also looks at some sample criticism and explores Behn's drama as performance.