Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century English Comedies as a New Kind of Drama: A Foucauldian Interpretation of Family Relations, Sexuality, and Resistance as Psychological Power

Abstract

This book opens new ways to study a literary genre that has been neglected far too long, and one misunderstood by many. For centuries the Restoration and its comedy have been ignored and rejected by critics and audiences in general. This study sheds new light on this period of drama by revealing how the general chaos that the passage from a pre-modern to a modern society supposed, the uncertainty and the unpredictability of a transitional period in the history of the country and also its deeper social and political message.