An Analysis of Oliver Goldsmith’s *She Stoops to Conquer, Or, the Mistakes of a Night* in the Light of Mikhail Bakhtin's Concepts of “carnival,” “dialogism,” and “chronotope”

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Assistant Professor / Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University

2 MA Holder in English Language and Literature / Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University

Abstract

Oliver Goldsmith’s literary reputation was boosted by the publication of his comedy, She Stoops to Conquer, Or, the Mistakes of a Night. The frequent references to the events and literary works of the eighteenth century England have enriched the play as they attest the presence of profound meanings behind the characters’ live dialogues. This paper is an attempt to investigate the literary and social meanings of the play in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of “carnival,” “dialogism,” and “chronotope” to examine the existing dialogues and the temporal and spatial elements of the text in order to elucidate how Goldsmith, through creation of a carnivalesque situation, illustrates a society in which the voices of the servants, women, and those who are subordinated to higher authorities attain significance and are heard while the imposed social norms and ideologies of the authorities who marginalize the voice of the lower classes are questioned.

Keywords

References

ابجدیان، امرالله، (1383). تاریخ ادبیات انگلیس: ادبیات روزگار بازگشت پادشاهی و سدة هجدهم،‌ ویرایش اول، جلد ششم، انتشارات
دانشگاه شیراز.
پورآذر، رؤیا، مترجم (1391). شکسپیر و کارناوال: پس از باختین، نشر هرمس. نویسنده اصلی: رونلد نولز.
سلیمی کوچی، ابراهیم، و فاطمه سکوت جهرمی، (1391). «گفت­وگومداری و چندصدایی در رمان جزیرة سرگردانی اثر سیمین
دانشور»، پژوهش ادبیات معاصر جهان، دورة 17، شمارة 2: 77-91.
مقدادی، بهرام، و فرزاد بوبانی، (1382). «جویس و منطق مکالمه: رویکردی باختینی به اولیس جیمز جویس»، پژوهش زبان‌های
خارجی، شمارة 15: 19-29.
 
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
---. (1984). Introduction. Rabelais and His World. By Bakhtin. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press. 1-58.
---. (1986). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans.
Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.
---. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. Caryl Emerson. Trans. Caryl Emerson.
London: University of Minnesota Press.
Brooks, Christopher K. (1992). “Goldsmith‘s Feminist Drama: She Stoops to Conquer, Silence and
Language.” Papers on Language and Literature 28.1: 38-51. Academic Search Premier.
Web. 22 Dec. 2012.
Capp, Bernard. (2007). “Gender and the Culture of the English Alehouse in Late Stuart England.”
Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences 2: 103-127. University of
Warwick Publications Service and WRAP. Web. 26 July 2014. <http:// wrap.warwick.ac.uk/>.
Carson, James P. (2004). “‘The Little Republic’ of the Family: Goldsmith’s Politics of Nostalgia.”
Eighteenth Century Fiction 16.2: 173-196. ProQuest. Web. 20 June 2014.
Clasen, Molly. (2011). “Carnival of Words: Applying Bakhtin to Spoken Word Poetry.” Diss. Pacific
University. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. <http://commons.pacificu.edu/>.
 “Drawing Room.” Wikipedia the free Encyclopedia. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. <http://www.
en.wikipedia.org >.
Elliot, Shanti. (1999). “Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin‘s Poetics of Folklore.” Folklore Forum 30:
129-139. EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.
Evans, James. (2011). “The Dullissimo Maccaroni‘: Masculinities in She Stoops to Conquer.” Philological Quarterly 90.1: 45-65. EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Feb. 2013.
Foresti, Monica. (2006). “Bakhtinian Theory and Modernist Theatre: Carnival and Dialogism in
Shaw’s Arms and the Man, Jarry’s Ubo Roi, and Pirandello’s Sei Personaggi in Cerca
D’Autore and Enrico IV.” Diss. University of London. Web. 12 Dec. 2013.
<http://ethos.bl. uk/>.
Gasbarrone, Lisa. (1994). “‘The Locus for the Other’: Cixous, Bakhtin, and Women’s Writing.” A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin. Ed. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1-19.
Ghini, Giuseppe. (2012). “Bakhtin’s Carnival as a Gnostic Chronotope.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 39:
39-46. Web. 20 June 2014. <http://www.utoronto.ca/>.
Goldsmith, Oliver. (1989). She Stoops to Conquer, Or, the Mistakes of a Night. Ed. A. Norman
Jeffares. Beirut: York Press.
Helgerson, Richard. (1973). “The Two Worlds of Oliver Goldsmith.” Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900 13.3: 516-534. JSTOR. Web. 22 June 2014.
Holquist, Michael. (2002). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Jaireth, Subhash. (1996). “Theatre of the Times of Socrates, Lunin and Nero: Time and Space in
Edvard Radzinskii’s Trilogy Theatre of the Times... .” Diss. Australian National University.
Keunen, Bart. (2000). “Bakhtin, Genre Formation, and the Cognitive Turn: Chronotopes as Memory
Schemata.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2.2: 1-15. Web. 30 June 2014.
<http:// docs.lib.purdue.edu/>.
---. (2010). “The Chronotopic Imagination in Literature and Film: Bakhtin, Bergson and Deleuze on
Forms of Time.” Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications,
Perspectives. Ed. Nele Bemong et al. Gent: Academic Press. 35-57.
Kohn, Robert E. (2005). “Parody, Heteroglossia, and Chronotope in Don DeLillo’s Great Jones
Street.” Style 39.2: 206-216. JSTOR. Web. 16 June 2014.
Laroque, François. (1998). “Shakespeare’s ‘Battle of Carnival and Lent’: The Falstaff Scenes
Reconsidered (1&2 Henry IV).” Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. Ed. Ronald
Knowles. Houndmills: Macmillan Press Ltd. 83-96.
Miller, Gregory A. (1982). Perception of the Comic Muse: Correlating Theory and Practice Hogarth
and Goldsmith. Diss. Ohio University. Ann Arbor: UMI. ProQuest. Web. 19 June 2014.
Rousseau, G. S., ed. (1974). Oliver Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage. New York: Routledge.
Sobchack, Tom. (1996). “Bakhtin’s ‘Carnivalesque’ in 1950s British Comedy.” Journal of Popular
Film and Television 23.4: n. pag. EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Dec. 2013.
Tucker Jr., Herbert F. (1979). “Goldsmith‘s Comic Monster.” Studies in English Literature 19.3: 493-
499. EBSCO Academic Search Premier. Web. 19 Nov. 2013.
Walker, Duncan. “The Three Pigeons Inn in Brentford.” BrentfordDock. Web. 10 July 2014.
<http://www.brentforddockresidents.co.uk/ >.
Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 20, Issue 2 - Serial Number 72
Autumn & Winter
October 2015
Pages 245-274

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics