The "Impure" Drama: the Conflict of Genre Conventions in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama

FAIN: FR-10242-78

Joan C. Marx
Denison University (Granville, OH 43023-1100)

To work on a three-part project: (l) to explore, in depth, in as pure a form as possible, these select genres: dramatic satire, pastoral romance, fairytale, Italian intrigue, and the history play; (2) to consider genre shifts in assumption in some Elizabethan and Jacobean plays; and (3) to do corollary readings in the new theory of genre criticism by folklorists and structuralists. The relationship between theory and abstract forms of genre and the shape of particular works has been and continues to be a large and provocative question for literary scholars.