New Women in the New Drama

McDonald, Jan

doi:10.1017/s0266464x0000395x

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Surveying the interrelationship of characterisations of the New Woman and the developing new drama movement during the 1880s and 1890s, Jan McDonald comments that 'the issues raised by these men [the new dramatists] were felt to be relevant to the intelligent women of the period'. 55 The new dramatists, McDonald contends: in presenting for scrutiny what they perceived to be the social inequalities of their time, posed questions to their audiences rather than proffering solutions. In dealing with the 'woman question', one of their greatest innovations in terms of dramaturgy was to move the female character into prominence as the real subject of the playto give her an active rather than a passive role.…”

Section: Ida In Earnest: the Seriousness Of Comic Operamentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

Lybeck

2023

Literature & History

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Gilbert and Sullivan's eighth Savoy opera Princess Ida (1884) is best understood against the backdrop of women's higher education and emancipation in nineteenth-century Britain. Careful work has been done in tracing correspondences between the opera and its source texts, but Ida is not only a descendant of literary figures. She is the peer of the pioneering women of Girton College, Cambridge whose biographies attest to the challenges faced by women in pursuit of an education at the end of the nineteenth century. This association allows Ida and her students to be positioned as precursors of that fin-de-siècle phenomenon, the New Woman. Often dismissed as an uncomfortable relic of Victorian male chauvinism, the political and ideological complexity behind Princess Ida is recognised here as the opera is identified as one moment in continuous literary, cultural and social history.

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Section: Ida In Earnest: the Seriousness Of Comic Operamentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

Lybeck

2023

Literature & History

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The Play With a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero's New Drama

Wozniak

2009

Victorian Literature and Culture

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In the late Victorian period, when writers, critics, and actors of the English theatre became obsessed with defining a decidedly New Drama – with establishing its history, directing its progress forward, and creating a literary drama – the majority of the plays produced focused upon forms of femininity. Strangely, these innovative dramas engaged not with the future, but with an all-too-familiar stock character: the woman with a past. This well-known type was “a lady whose previous conduct, rightly or wrongly, disqualified her from any position of rank or respect” (Rowell 108–09). Familiar examples of such plays include George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (1892); lesser-known ones include Henry Arthur Jones's Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and two plays that form the focus of this essay, Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (1895). Several English theatre historians (including Richard Dietrich and Jean Chothia) present these plays as the basis of modern intellectual drama, yet none explains the paradox that the theatre of modernity is founded upon the woman with a past, a figure whose future in these plays is foreclosed or ambivalently conceptualized at best.

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Comment récrire une histoire littéraire mixte ? L’exemple du théâtre des suffragettes

Janin¹

2003

Nouvelles Questions Féministes

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En se basant sur l’exemple du théâtre des suffragettes anglaises, que la recherche féministe et les études genre ont permis de redécouvrir, l’article questionne la lenteur avec laquelle l’histoire littéraire assimile les contributions des autrices. Ces pièces, qui ont participé à l’avènement du théâtre moderne et dont les innovations formelles méritent une plus grande attention, ont ét écartées de son histoire en vertu d’une théorie esthétique aussi partiale que contradictoire. Appuyant la thèse de Catherine Kelly selon laquelle le discours critique de la modernité s’est construit sur une norme masculine et cosmopolite qui se déclarait universelle, l’analyse démontre que ces pièces ont été doublement déconsidérées, en tant qu’écriture dite « féminine », mais également en tant que pièces « militantes ». Tout en démontrant que l’assimilation de ces contributions passe nécessairement par une remise en question de la théorie littéraire, l’argument souligne aussi le besoin d’analyser les contradictions des critères formels au sein du discours féministe et des études genre pour pouvoir reconstituer une tradition de la mixité.

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New Women in the New Drama

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

The Play With a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero's New Drama

Comment récrire une histoire littéraire mixte ? L’exemple du théâtre des suffragettes

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