The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary English Tragedy SEAN CARNEY UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 3 1 David Hare: The Work of Mourning, or, The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Bourgeoisie 25 The Year of Magical Thinking - Teeth 'n Smiles - Plenty - The Secret Rapture - Skylight - Amy's View - The Judas Kiss - My Zinc Bed - The Permanent Way - The Vertical Hour - Gethsemane 2 Howard Barker: Will and Desire - From the Tragedy of Socialism to the Ecstasy of the Unconscious 68 Claw - Fair Slaughter - That Good Between Us - The Power of the Dog - Victory - The Castle - The Europeans - The Possibilities - Gertrude - The Cry - Dead Hands - The Seduction of Almighty God by the Boy Priest Loftus in the Abbey of Calcetto, 1539 3 Edward Bond: Tragedy and Postmodernity, or, The Promethean Impulse 123 Saved - Lear - Bingo - The Fool - Restoration - The War Plays - Olly's Prison - At the Inland Sea - Coffee - The Crime of the Twenty-First Century - Chair vi Contents 4 Caryl Churchill: The Dionysian Mobius Strip 175 Seven Jewish Children - Lovesick - Abortive - Owners - Traps - Light Shining in Buckinghamshire - Cloud Nine - Top 'Girls - Fen - A Mouthful of Birds - Lives of the Great Poisoners - The Skriker - Thyestes - Far Away - A Number 5 New English Tragedians: The Tragedy of the Tragic 231 Mark Ravenhill: Shopping and Fucking - Faust Is Dead - Handbag - Some Explicit Polaroids - Product - The Cut - pool (no water) Sarah Kane: Blasted - Phaedra's Love - Cleansed - Crave - 4.48 Psychosis Conclusion: Late Modernism in Jerusalem 285 Notes 301 Works Cited 323 Index 335 .