Verna A. Foster. The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy.(Book review)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-06

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Verna A. Foster. The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Studies in European Cultural Transition 18. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. vi + 217. $99.95.

Few critics today attempt to span different historical periods in a single study, or even career. Verna A. Foster's ambitious book The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy addresses both Renaissance and modern tragicomedy in a concentrated manner, while offering some reflections on tragicomedy or approximations to it in medieval drama, the Restoration, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such a study, surely reflecting wide personal experience apparently acquired through extensive playgoing as well as teaching and research, is in many ways a welcome addition in an age of intense specialization. Genre, as Alastair Fowler (drawing upon Wittgenstein) has argued, proposes "family resemblances" between members of its categories. Critics write both from and to specific interpretive communities; often a disagreement between two critics may be largely traceable to the fact that they come from two different interpretive communities who each work from different sets of texts. Academic theatergoers (who certainly don't make up the majority of those academics who...

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