Domestic Drama
Domestic drama refers to a genre of literature that focuses on the everyday lives, relationships, and conflicts within a family or household. It often explores themes such as marriage, parenting, and social dynamics within the home. Domestic dramas typically emphasize the personal and emotional aspects of characters' lives, offering insights into human behavior and societal norms.
3 Key excerpts on "Domestic Drama"
- Chiara Briganti, Kathy Mezei(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Delafield, E.H. Young, Jan Struther), the monstrous (Ivy Compton-Burnett) and the rebellious (Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann). As a genre, the domestic novel runs the gamut from drawing-room comedy (Dodie Smith, Stella Gibbons), 2 golden age detective novel of manners (Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers), 3 lyrical exposé of life in the bourgeois home (May Sinclair, F.M. Mayor, Enid Bagnold) and popular saga (Angela Thirkell) to experimental high modernism (Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield and Stevie Smith). 4 The meaning of home and representations of houses are obviously central to the domestic novel genre. 5 When theorizing dislocation in his essay, ‘The World and the Home’, Homi Bhabha queried ‘must the novel be a house?’(446); his query surely presupposes its converse: must the house be a novel with its own narrative, characters and plot? The following discussion tries to untangle this long-standing and intricate connection between house and novel and its implications for the domestic novel and modernism. For example, both novel and house are dwelling places and spaces whose deep structures demonstrate anatomical, psychological and descriptive equivalences and whose ‘architecture’ can be similarly read as Gothic, or modern, or postmodern. And so, just as the novel is itself a domestic space housing characters and plots in a time–space alliance, 6 domestic spaces exist as ‘fictional constructs … stories the telling of which has the power to create the “we” who are engaged in telling them’ (Bammer: ix). Within both these spaces dwell inhabitants – the ubiquitous family or household or kinship system that sustains and is sustained by the physical and spiritual structures of the space of houses and novels. 7 As Angelika Bammer suggests, home (and from our point of view, the novel) ‘might be thought of as an enacted space within which we try and play out roles and relationships of both belonging and foreignness’ (ix)...
eBook - ePubSocial History of Art, Volume 3
Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism
- Arnold Hauser(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...3. THE ORIGINS OF Domestic Drama The middle-class novel of manners and family life represented a complete innovation compared with the various forms of heroic, pastoral and picaresque novel, which had dominated the whole field of light fiction until the middle of the eighteenth century, but it was by no means so deliberately and methodically opposed to the older literature as the middle-class drama, which arose in conscious antithesis to classical tragedy and became the mouthpiece of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The mere existence of an elevated drama, the protagonists of which were all members of the middle class, was in itself an expression of the claim of this class to be taken just as seriously as the nobility from which the heroes of tragedy had sprung. The middle-class drama implied from the very outset the relativizing and belittling of the heroic and aristocratic virtues and was in itself an advertisement for bourgeois morality and the middle-class claim to equality of rights. Its whole history was determined by its origins in bourgeois class-consciousness. To be sure, it was by no means the first and only form of the drama to have its source in a social conflict, but it was the first example of a drama which made this conflict its very theme and which placed itself openly in the service of a class struggle. The theatre had always propagated the ideology of the classes by which it had been financed, but class differences had never before formed more than the latent, never the manifest and explicit content of its productions...
eBook - ePub- Sean Benson(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
...which may be said to form a class of itself” (49). His judgment has stood the test of time. A number of studies were devoted to the genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, out of which Henry Hitch Adams’s English Domestic, or Homiletic Tragedy 1575–1642 (1943) emerged as and remains the authoritative critical work. Martin Wine borrows Adams’s titular framework for a working definition of the genre: Plays within this classification deal with protagonists “below the ranks of nobility” (domestic), 6 inculcate “lessons of morality and religious faith in the citizens who [come] to the theatres by offering them examples drawn from the lives and customs of their own kind of people” (homiletic), and end “in death for the protagonist” (tragedy). (1973: lvii–lviii) Although the Renaissance is rich in uncanonical and mixed kinds (Fowler 181; Colie 10–28), there was one rudimentary distinction between comedy and tragedy that was almost universally observed: “In a Tragedy”, as Thomas Blount’s notes in Glossographia, “the greatest parts of the actors are Kings and Noble persons; In a Com[e]dy, private persons of meaner state and condition” (1656: 2R4v). What makes domestic tragedy distinctive is its representation of nonaristocratic characters as tragic protagonists: the murders are committed by and against members of the lesser gentry and their spouses. Although this is certainly in keeping with how genres actually evolve, it is worth exploring further the appearance of this innovation on the English stage. The notion that the lead characters of a tragedy should be of high rank is ultimately of Aristotelian origin, and was propagated by Horace and countless others as well...
