Alan Ayckbourn's "Season's Greetings" in the Comic Tradition
M a Oliver Baum
Grin Publishing
2009
pokkari
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Institut f r Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: SE: "British Drama from the 1950s to the Present," 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the placement of Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings in the English comic tradition. Therefore, I will first put Ayckbourn's play within the historical context of the new drama, and subsequently define the term "comedy." Then, I will prove my thesis that Season's Greetings matches both conventionality and innovation with regard to comedy. In this way, I will also investigate in how far Season's Greetings as comedy contains both farcical and tragic elements, and suits other subgenres of comedy, too. Likewise, I will analyse how Ayckbourn makes use of the comic in Season's Greetings, and discuss if he continues the comic tradition with a new emphasis with regard to the assumption that he, like Shakespeare, writes plays for the spectator rather than the reader, among other things. In the conclusion, I will recap and reconsider the principal theses of my term paper and give my own diagnosis about Ayckbourn's drama. My thesis matters in so far that "the continuing life that ...] comedies have ...] justifies our study of the genre ...]." Besides, English comedy has "the longest, most continuous generic tradition in Western literature," in which its tendency to the meta-theatrical achieves an awareness of the comic tradition onstage (cf. Leggatt 2). Anyway, it is meaningful that serious issues of everyday life are treated in a comic way.
