TY - JOUR
AU - STIERSTORFER, KLAUS
AB -  Abstract: Throughout the theatre of the rwentieth Century now drawing to a close, the genre of farce has secured a prominent place in the limelight of critical attention. As a major focus of modern playwrights' creative interest, it has developed in a variety of imaginative directions. Formal and thematic innovations, with the complete structural break-up in the theatre of the absurd äs an extreme case, appear to have dissevered the modern specimens of farce from its tradition reaching back to antiquity. Such recent celebrity is in stark contrast to the low esteem the genre enjoyed in the preceding Century. Despite its quantitative abundance in Victorian times, farce led an existence beyond the ken of most critics and below any serious considerations by the doyens of the literary world. It was, however, precisely this general neglect that produced a space of liberty from oppressive rules and obligations. As this essay sets out to show, nineteenth-century writers of farce used this freedom to push and subvert the traditional limits of the genre in ways which truly opened up and prefigured the possibilities realized by their modern successors. Against all appearances, the seeds of modern farce began to germinate in the 
TI - CHAOS UNFRAMED: VICTORIAN PATTERNS OF FARCE AND THEIR TWENTIETH-CENTURY VARIATIONS
JO - Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie
DO - 10.1515/angl.1998.116.3.299
DA - 1998-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/chaos-unframed-victorian-patterns-of-farce-and-their-twentieth-century-cDLdC6VzvV
SP - 299
EP - 325
VL - 116
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -