A Metadramatic Study On Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning Plays

Edward Albee(1928-2016),a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner,is one of the most influential American playwrights in the 20~thh century.As a prolific and accomplished playwright,Albee made tremendous contribution to American modern drama in play writing and theatre directing.His Tony Award-winning plays,Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?and The Goat,or Who is Sylvia?,are considered as the most provocative,daring,and controversial plays among his works.Albee applied metadramatic devices in these two plays and revealed the confrontation between illusion and reality.Metadramatic devices present multiple layers of a particular play and the multiplicity is of great importance in the process of analyzing a metadrama.This thesis is a metadramatic study on Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning plays.It aims to investigate how Richard Hornby’s metadramatic devices work in Edward Albee’s two plays.The primary attention is focused on the metadrama devices applied in plays,including the play within the play,the ceremony in the play,role playing within the role.Accordingly,metadramatic devices in Albee’s plays are the ways of his expressing the problematization and questioning on existential concerns,social concerns and individual concerns.In addition,further study will be made to explore literary reference,real-life reference,and self reference in the two plays.The significance of the thesis lies in three aspects.Firstly,through analyzing metadramatic devices used in Who’s Afraid and The Goat,this thesis widens the scope of the study on Edward Albee’s plays.Secondly,this thesis satisfies reader’s aesthetic demand,and enriches their knowledge on metadrama and metadramatic devices.Thirdly,Albee’s understanding on existential concerns,social concerns and individual concerns on human beings are discussed in this thesis.It is hoped that this thesis will provide people with some special insights on the interrelationships between people and their surroundings.