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The Cocktail Party Essay | Critical Essay #3

This Study Guide consists of approximately 63 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Cocktail Party.
This section contains 2,549 words
(approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page)
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The Cocktail Party Critical Essay #3

In the following essay, Davenport explores how the "same two-eyed vision which brings laughter brings salvation from the prison of self' in The Cocktail Party.

T. S. Eliot's plays, like his poetry, have always inspired critical extremes, few writers have had such loyal disciples or such violent detractors. The Cocktail Party (1949), the first of his post-war comedies, is no exception. Its problematical nature, one feels, is largely the result of Eliot's ambitious attempt to reconcile two seemingly incompatible elements: high moral seriousness and "light" comedy in the Noel Coward Idiom. Thus, much of the discussion of the play has rightly centered on its comedy. In his final chapter to the third edition of Matthiessen's book on Eliot, C. L. Barber draws attention to the importance of the comic tone of the final argument between Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne in the consulting room of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, maintaining that...
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This section contains 2,549 words
(approx. 9 pages at 300 words per page)
Purchase our The Cocktail Party Study Guide
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The Cocktail Party from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.
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