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Article: Rehabilitating naturalism.
- Article from:
- Inroads: A Journal of Opinion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Inroads, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ARTHUR MILNER HAS WORKED IN professional theatre for 25 years. In this essay, he explores problems in contemporary theatre criticism and, by implication, cultural criticism in general. He traces theatre history through the birth of naturalism in the 1870s and the anti-naturalist rebellion that followed it, and explains why contemporary dramatists still refer to certain work as avant garde or experimental, even though the "experiment" has, according to Milner, long since ended. Using as example the work of Canadian playwrights Tomson Highway and George F. Walker, Milner examines the contribution of poststructuralist academics. While many critics and theatre artists dismiss ...