The Stuff That Plays are Made of

Af Svetlana Klimenko

Linguistic Approaches to the Interpretation of Post-war British Drama with Special Reference to the Linguopoetic Method. Through extensive case studies of five post-war British playwrights – Priestley, Osborne, Beckett, Shaffer and Stoppard – Svetlana Klimenko frames a complex interdisciplinary argument, demonstrates a rich variety of ways in which units of language structure can yield a theatrical effect, and challenges the alleged divide between the literary and the theatrical. The book contains an authoritative and concise survey of ‘the language of literature’ as an academic field, with special reference to the school of Russian philological thinking and its historical developments since Roman Jakobson. Moving between theory and analysis, Svetlana Klimenko illuminates the advantages of the linguopoetic method to the full as she substantiates, complements or even corrects previous interpretations of the plays under consideration. The Stuff That Plays are Made of is essential reading for anyone interested in modern English literature and theatre, stylistics, poetics, drama studies, literary theory and performance analysis. The Stuff That Plays are Made of is based on a PhD thesis, Department of English, University of Copenhagen ”…Precisely because the method employed is linguopoetic, the emphasis is very much on language as a powerful, and varied, scenic device. …Precisely in the time when visual effects seem to dominate the theatre, it is so healthy to be reminded of the significance of verbal expressiveness, especially in such a talented fashion, as is the case with Svetlana Klimenko’s thesis.” Svend Christiansen, University of Copenhagen, Department of Theatre Studies.