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Scholarly commentary on Cormac McCarthy’s The Stonemason has generally coalesced around the idea that Ben Telfair’s tragic flaw negatively impacts his family, although an understanding of precisely how Ben loses his way may vary. First, the article shows how Papaw’s allusion to the works of Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King, Jr., helps clarify Ben’s moral failure. Second, analysis of two pivotal confessional scenes in Act Five highlights the significant role and agency Ben’s wife Maven assumes in guiding her husband to tragic recognition, an acknowledgment of his mistakenness and responsibility, and the need for grace and charity. After Ben’s conversion and turn toward justice, McCarthy’s drama suggests comic possibility through Papaw’s enduring example and the motif of naming and renaming, so that the play may justifiably be classified as tragicomic rather than unrelievedly tragic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dreams are a central feature of the extended realism of Ralph Ellison’s second novel, some drafts of which have been published as Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . In this novel, dreams help Ellison’s characters realize or present truths that cannot be presented in the language of straightforward realism. In a quasi- Freudian manner, Ellison’s dream narrations reveal his characters’ and novels’ most fundamental preoccupations. In this article I analyze part of a dream sequence from Book I of Three Days. This dream, had by a white liberal character, is centered on the figure of an iron groom (or hitching-post boy) who cannot be removed from the doorway to a house. I analyze the construction and function of this dream figure and narrative through the lens of (1) Ellison’s ritualist social criticism, (2) his extended-realist, tragicomic, and syncretic aesthetics, and (3) his allusive and narrative poiesis. The iron groom is constructed as a stereotype of blackness, linked to the major black characters of the novel and to figures in Ellison’s first novel. The groom-as-stereotype is subverted through verbal “signifying” and through the development of a tragicomic narrative rhythm. The dream functions to excavate the dreamer’s (and possibly the reader’s) “self-concealed racism” and to point the way toward what Ellison has called “the mystery of our unity-within- diversity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through its mixture of similarities to and differences from typical slow cinema practices, Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor (2000) offers a unique perspective on what slow cinema can be. This is apparent in the film's mise en scène and cinematography. While the use of long takes, minimalist performances and deep focus fit comfortably within slow cinema tradition, Songs from the Second Floor differentiates itself with its expansive mise en scène, vast set designs and stationary camera. The film further expands on slow cinema with its inclusion of tragicomic humour, which complements slow cinema's modernist re-appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Perspectives on Culture / Perspektywy Kultury is the property of Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), laughing out loud is the most common act shared by all the characters. This laughter often surfaces during moments of tension, failure, or encounters with death. The tragicomic nature of this laughter, arising from such circumstances, mirrors a postmodernist playful stance towards assertions of singularity and unquestionable truths, operating on both structural and thematic levels. The laughter characters produce may seem as inappropriate in certain situations. However, seen from a postmodernist perspective, it can be defined as an expression of scepticism towards diseased metanarratives and absolute foundations. The postmodern tendency to question and revise claims to ultimate truth finds resonance in the loud laughter of pain and relief. Within the postmodernist context, laughter transforms into an anti-foundational nonverbal expression against constraints and oppression. This paper asserts the postmodernist nature of laughter, frequently heard in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, emphasising its playful yet serious tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work deals with the term tragi-comédie in the first decades of the 17th century in France, when the standards of the literary genre were established: a novelistic and sentimental topic, a happy ending, and the mixture of the tragic and the familiar. Then we focus on the figure of Jean Mairet, author of six tragicomedies in his theatrical production from 1625 to 1643: Chryséide et Arimand, La Virginie, L’Illustre Corsaire, Le Roland furieux, L’Athénaïs and La Sidonie. Mairet would reign on the French stage in the third decade of the 17th century, later eclipsed only by Pierre Corneille. Of his tragicomedies, La Virginie is one of those that is not based on any other fiction, being entirely invented by the author, who uses language to differentiate some characters from others, whether lofty and noble, melancholic or sorrowful, or insidious and malicious.

Copyright of Foreign Literature Studies is the property of Foreign Literature Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the origin of the tragicomic tale "The Luck of Roaring Camp" by Bret Harte. Topics include comment from biographer George Stewart about the sudden appearance of the short story, the connection between a speech given by orator Henry Whitney Bellows during the Society of California Pioneers' celebration of the anniversary of California's statehood in 1864 and Harte's breakout story, and Bellows' impressions of California which reverberate in Harte's fiction.

Marlene van Niekerk's 1994 Triomf is a plaasroman , or farm novel, without the farm; it formally resembles a nostalgic pastoral genre initiated by the collapse of Southern African agricultural economy around the time of the Great Depression, but removes even the symbol of the farm as aesthetic compensation for material loss. In the process, van Niekerk composes a post-apartheid tragicomedy of a lumpenproletariat white supremacist family coming into long-belated class consciousness, an epiphany which, surprisingly, survives the novel's translations from Afrikaans to South African English to 'international' English. Crucially, this understanding is mediated by a critical tendency to appraise Triomf in the context of Faulkner and the Southern Gothic, a generic comparison which gets a lot wrong but is ultimately very revealing, less about Triomf than about the imperial world-system through which it circulates and is consecrated. Consequently, the novel stages globally what seems at first to be a parochial question: how is one supposed to imagine democratic reconciliation and integration after apartheid, when one of the classes to be reconciled lacks historical self-consciousness and has no obvious place in either the apartheid regime or the post-apartheid dispensation? By analyzing van Niekerk's novel and the institutions which consecrate it, the paper fleshes out critiques of world-literary hermeneutics, specifically for its naive handling of genre and context, and of post-apartheid 'reconciliation' under capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La Celestina is influenced by ideological and aesthetic aspects of its time, such as moralising literature, the new lyrical currents coming from Italy and the emergence of new literary genres. However, it is emphasised that the author was directly or indirectly familiar with the main classical authors and uses them to reinforce the didactic and moralising character of the work. Already at the beginning of the Prologue, Heraclitus, Petrarch, Aristotle, Pliny, and Lucan are mentioned in order to highlight how the struggles between masters and slaves, between pleasure and virtue, between the earthly and the heavenly world are the backbone of the play’s plot. In this context, the cultivation of sorcery cannot be absent. In La Celestina, we see techniques of sympathetic magic, such as the nomen omen and the possession of another person's will through objects. The passage of Celestina’s incantation, as well as the possession of Melibea’s cord, are examples of this. Apuleius’ Metamorphoses may have been a source of inspiration for the author of the Tragicomedy. Along with the techniques of witchcraft, we observe in the work an almost parodic distortion of Christian discourse to justify certain behaviours. Magic and enchantment were considered dangerous and related to the devil and witchcraft, and those accused of practising magic could be persecuted and severely punished. La Celestina is an example of how superstition in a broad sense (magic and religion) is used to give an irrational explanation to phenomena, such as Calisto's amorous obsession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of eHumanista is the property of Professor Antonio Cortijo-Ocana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article Gretchen Minton and Mikey Gray discuss an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragicomedy Cymbeline that toured Montana and surrounding states in the summer of 2021. Minton's sections describe the eco-feminist aims of this production, which was part of an international project called 'Cymbeline in the Anthropocene', showing how the costumes, set design, and especially the emphasis upon the female characters created generative ways of thinking about the relationship between the human and the more-than-human worlds. Gray's first-person narrative at the end of each section reflects upon her role of Imogen as she participated in an extensive summer tour across the Intermountain West and engaged with audience members about their own relationship to both theatre and the natural world. This is a story of transformation through environmentally inflected Shakespeare performance during the time of a global pandemic. Gretchen E. Minton is Professor of English at Montana State University, Bozeman, and editor of several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger's Tragedy. She is the dramaturg and script adaptor for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks and the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre. Her directorial projects include A Doll's House, Timon of Anaconda (see NTQ 145, February 2021), Shakespeare's Walking Story, and Shakespeare for the Birds. Mikey Gray received her BA in Theatre and Performance from Bard College, New York, with a conservatory semester at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) in Sydney. She has performed in four productions with Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, while other actor engagements include Chicago Shakespeare Theater, American Conservatory Theater, Strawdog Theater Company, The Passage Theatre, and McCarter Theatre Center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article opens with a brief history of a genre of literary works that blend both tragic and comic elements, the latter of which seem to have been increasingly more prominent in European culture in general. This article examines various functions of the tragic and comic combination in Cervantes' Don Quixote, some scenes from Shakespeare's King Lear, and two modern narrative fictions, where the main character is simultaneously heroic and comic, Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote and Sławomir Mrożek's short story The Last Hussar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, Elena Shvarts (1948-2010) wrote her only play, which takes up the unhappy fate of Russian Emperor Ivan VI Antonovich and his would-be rescuer, Vasilii Mirovich. Drawing on a myriad of historical and literary sources, and experimenting in a variety of styles, this historical tragicomedy demonstrates both the young author's mastery of dramatic form and her (post)modern penchant for quotation, paradox, and collisions of meaning. Drawing from commedia dell'arte and Modernist balagan, engaging Pushkin, Gogol, and Shakespeare, deploying absurdist humor and classical tragedy, politics and puppets, Shvarts's supersaturated play is revealing both of the author and her times. This essay attempts to elucidate several of these connections, to clarify some of the author's intentions, and to place this early, unusual work within the overall context of Shvarts's oeuvre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lampas is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through an analysis of the settings of three comedies and tragicomedies of the 1630s, La Rosella, Li duo baci and La Rosa, this essay highlights the later developments of Giovan Battista Andreini's 'pastoral poetics'. The pastoral elements, which the author puts to use throughout the entire arc of his theatrical production, are here stylized, lacking the dynamic contribution that the genre offered in the Baroque age. What emerges is a previously unremarked trait of Andreini's dramaturgical writing, which gives a singular metaphorical value to the environmental descriptions and translates the actor's performativity into rhetorical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prologue of Thomas Heywood's tragicomedy The English Traveller, which was first performed around 1627 and first printed in 1633, seeks to focus the minds of its audience on what is to follow on stage: A Strange Play you are like to haue, for know, We use no Drum, nor Trumpet, nor Dumbe shew; No Combate, Marriage, not so much to day, As Song, Dance, Masque, to bumbaste out a play: [...] (The English Traveller, n.p.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare's. The Lover's Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck's subtitle 'A Strange Truth' and the word 'strange' appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat, a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I consider 'strangeness' as a performative phenomenon directly related to the experimental multiperspectivity of the early Stuart stage. As such, it is not a quality ascribed to individual characters, but the norm ruling interactions between them: all characters are strangers to each other. This constellation drives theatrical agon and suspense, turning spectators into privileged witnesses to an all-encompassing strangeness of which characters are often unaware. This theatrical take on strangeness supplements and potentially undercuts contextual and thematic explanations of the early modern stage's fascination with the odd and exotic. Thus in John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621), the conflict between Christianity and Islam ostensibly depicted in this tragicomedy is challenged, if not superseded, by a more existential and ubiquitous notion of strangeness at the play's core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Philip Massinger's The Maid of Honour, showing how this tragicomedy set in Italy is resonant of stories, ideas, theories and characters from the Italian literary and cultural tradition. On the one hand, I will shed light on Massinger's use of an Italian ambience, concentrating on the choice of Palermo and Siena as a setting. The pseudo-historic setting of the play may be seen as a pretext to dramatize the author's moral needs and convey a form of political ideology, which reflects the social tensions and the political concerns of the period. On the other hand, I will discuss the different forms of legacy from the Italian world, focusing on the cultural forces, and the moral and ideological motivations behind the playwright's choice of the genre of his play, the changes concerning plot, setting and the characters' names in the original Italian text on which the tragicomedy is based. Moreover, this tragicomedy, characterized by a profound didactic and moral intent, also seems to combine some elements of the late 16th century commedia grave, mainly in the presence of an exemplary female protagonist, Camiola, who embodies the providential spirit of the Counter-Reformist attitudes in vogue in the period. Finally, I will examine the way an image of Italy is portrayed through language, analyzing the very marginal occurrence of the Italian language and the presence of Latin words and tags. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTThere is a vast difference between theatrical traditions of China and England as the two countries are geographically apart. Tang Xianzu (汤显祖 1550–1616) and Philip Sidney (1554–1586) lived at opposite ends of Eurasia and they had no idea of the other’s existence, let alone the other’s thoughts. Yet, by close attention to Tang Xianzu’s and Philip Sidney’s drama theories, I have identified striking similarities in terms of their focus on depth of thoughts and true feelings in artistic creation, their opinions and/or practices towards tragicomedy, and their views on the social functions of theater. Despite operating within diverse contexts – Tang in late Ming dynasty China and Sidney in Elizabethan England – commensurabilities of their drama theories further mark the departure for ruminations on perennial questions of human cognition and emotion process.

Critical literature has variously described The Duchess of Malfi as tragedy, tragicomedy, or anti-tragedy. The play actually features two interrelated journeys traceable to conflicting generic backgrounds carefully yoked together. One, shaped by Benjamin's martyr drama, underlines the Duchess's determination and resistance. The other is Bosola's tragic journey as a figure divided between conflicting loyalties, who eventually recognizes the wrongness of his choice and undergoes a moral transformation together with a dramatic conversion from hitman to avenger. Envisaged historically, Webster's counterpoint of tragedy and Trauerspiel is evidence at once of overall generic readjustments in the period, and of the specific crisis of revenge drama, as detected by Fredson Bowers. As an example of ongoing generic readjustments, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi reflects the historical moment when drama addresses the social emergence of bourgeois figures and shifts from male, heroic subjects to increasingly female, domestic ones. Responding to the generic crisis of revenge drama, it challenges the system of norms which supports tragic discourse, inviting instead a recognition of the Duchess as the martyr, and her brothers as the tyrants of Trauerspiel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While other critics of Miguel Street have examined how humor arises from V. S. Naipaul's somewhat condescending depiction of Miguel Street's inhabitants, this analysis focuses on the role of laughter and the "colonial clown" in the social fabric of Miguel Street to produce social and political critique. In the text's logic of laughter, this article argues that it is imperative to pay attention to the narrator's commentary on misplaced, or solitary laughs as well. In particular, we should be alert to moments that the narrator explicitly identifies as not funny, and that should instead be taken seriously by readers. The "colonial clown" in Naipaul's tragicomic stories not only captures the mimic elements of Naipaul's characters, which are inarguably present in the novel, but also the important role of humor, laughter, and exaggeration in the narrator's critical representation of the Trinidad of his childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most critical attention on laments for the dead in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea has focused on Pleberio's long lament for Melibea in Auto XXI, Elicia's lament for the loss of her lover, Sempronio, his companion, Pármeno, and her protector, Celestina, is highly significant for plot development. Her lament is a decisive event that sets in motion a plan for revenge that will ultimately lead to the deaths of Calisto and Melibea. This article demonstrates how Elicia's personal experience of loss brings about significant changes in her characterization. With the help of Areúsa, Elicia hatches a plan for vengeance on the aristocratic lovers that she despises. Building on Louise Haywood's studies of female laments for the dead, it examines Elicia's curse on Calisto and Melibea and shows how her words have real and tragic consequences. In Rojas's world, a prostitute's expression of grief is a force strong enough to topple the elites of society and fundamentally contribute to the tragedia embedded in his work's hybrid title. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a reassessment of the work of Tadeusz Rittner, a bilingual Polish/German writer and dramatist from Galicia who won much acclaim in the early decades of the last century. This article examines his narrative and dramatic strategies by focusing on his drama Lato (Summer), published in 1913. It is a story about a timid young man who, after hearing from his doctor that he will not live much longer, turns suddenly into a bold and shameless seducer. This could be the stuff of a conventional, farcical exposure of middle class hypocrisy, yet in Rittner's drama it becomes a fascinating study, never far from Czekhov and Witkacy, tapping all the resources of realism, irony and grotesque to show the whole spectrum of human emotions. The article argues, contrary to the traditional consensus, that his art owes a great deal to Vienna, where he spent most of his life. The peculiar combination of lightness and earthiness, the essence of the Viennese spirit, is crucial for his achievement - the creation of convincing and timeless dramas of human emotions, which expose the precariousness of interpersonal relations. This interpretation of Lato sets it free from the realistic-naturalistic straitjacket imposed upon it by a succession of theatre directors who thought of it as an anachronistic farce rather than a comedy of manners with sparkling dialogue and intelligent alteration of tragedy and comedy, seriousness and buffoonery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the book "The Maid of Honour" and play "The Roman Actor" by Philip Massinger which may have remembered and taken inspiration. It mentions Peter Beal's discovery of a prologue to the play in 1980 that seriously questioned the dating of Massinger's tragicomedy and tended to repeat some phrases and words over and over. It also mentions Senator Junius Rusticus complains about the immorality of Rome under Domitian.

A literary criticism for the book "La Pratique du théâtre" by French author François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac, is presented. Topics include laudatory judgment that the theoretician expresses about the construction of a tragicomedy by Le Métel de Boisrobert's "Palène"; and Stemming from the invention of Hipparine, a female character that he added to the fiction of poet Parthenius of Nicaea and classical theorists.

Though they may be the source of considerable amusement to audiences, tragicomic characters do not tend to use the word ‘comic’ to describe the fraught realities of their own lives. Indeed, the very task of finding an appropriate vocabulary to define their angst is one that poses substantial difficulties. There is an inner fragility behind a superficially comic veneer; the challenge for the playwright is to articulate this anxiety. This essay examines characters who are attempting to assess their place in a world with which they are fundamentally out of sync and, in doing so, tracks the difficulties they encounter in communicating this turmoil. In exploring how Ireland has grappled with its own fluctuating sense of identity throughout history, the essay begins by identifying some comparisons between a national mood of existential unrest and the characteristic traits of the tragicomic genre. While tragicomedy is not exclusive to Irish theatre, it resonates time and again in the works of the nation’s dramatists. Its significance will be investigated in three plays by three Irish playwrights: David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue, Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. This essay makes a case for the plays’ similarities in their use – and abuse – of language as a constituent part of the tragicomic genre and argues that the violence inflicted upon language is an extension of the violence witnessed onstage. Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and the form’s theories on the limitations of language, will be invoked as a point of reference for the plays. The resentment that results from the characters’ common experiences as outsiders in their respective communities demonstrates how internalised feelings of inferiority pave the way for a specific kind of restlessness – unmoored and volatile – that acts as a catalyst for the savagery that ensues. The essay concludes with an assessment of the role of laughter in circumstances wherein responses expressed through language alone are ultimately inadequate.

Ali Smith’s Artful innovatively mingles essay and fiction in a playful metatextual variation on Barthes’s ‘death of the author’. As a disruption of ordinary life, grief heralds a state of exception, aptly portrayed by the implosion of narrative structures. Smith’s aesthetics revolve around dissensions from the norm: the storyline features a ghostly dead character and sets an unusual, often comical tone in its bereavement story. Artful’s genre, tone and protagonists could be defined as exceptional, turning ex-centricity into a principle. The exception works as a postmodernist reversal of the norm, twisting the conventions of academic lectures and canonical grief tales.