A Study Of Ethical Relationships In Edward Albee's Plays

Edward Albee,as one of the foremost playwrights in contemporary American drama,won the Pulitzer Prize for three times during his more than five-decade writing career.His plays cover various topics such as family,marriage,death,etc.In the west,study on Edward Albee has made great achievements in the past decades,and Albee has always been regarded as a pessimist for his absurd theatrical techniques and merciless sarcasm of society.However,the domestic Albee criticism in breadth and depth are still developing compared with western countries.Ethical literary criticism mainly attempts to explore ethical problems through the analysis of ethical phenomenon and those relationships between man and society,man and others,and man and nature in literature works.The thesis argues that,if we attempt to read Albee's works from the perspective of ethical literary criticism,it is possible for us to find humanism and humanistic touch in them,along with his ethical concern and moral support for human existence covered by absurdity in his plays.The thesis is composed of five parts.Chapter One introduces Albee 's dramatic life and career as well as an overview of Albee criticism at home and abroad,aiming at pointing out the gap between western Albee study and domestic Albee study,the latter of which lacks resources and new perspectives.In addition,this chapter also gives a brief introduction to ethical literary criticism and its terminology.The body of this thesis consists of three chapters,that is,Chapter Two,Chapter Three and Chapter Four,each of which contains three of Albee's plays,trying to discuss Albee 's ethical concerns about man and society,man and man,man and nature respectively with the method of ethical literary criticism and intensive reading.Chapter Two attempts to return to the historical site and analyzes how the characters in Albee's Who s' Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,Everything in the Garden and The Man Who Had Three Arms suffer from the deformed society and lose themselves,revealing the playwright's call for the reconstruction of social ethical environment;Chapter Three refers to "family drama",Albee's most involved topic,discussing Albee's support and desire for family ethics through the alienation and dislocation of families appear in The Sandbox,The American Dream and A Delicate Balance;Chapter Four aims to dig out Albee's introspection of ecological ethic on the interactions between man and animals.Through The Zoo Story,Seascape and The Goat,or Who Is Syvia?,Albee seems to be an exponent of the co-existence between man and nature on the base of maintaining an "aesthetic distance"Chapter Five is the conclusion,in which the author argues that,Albee's ethical concerns for human society could be revealed by the analysis of ethical relationships in his plays.Instead of being a pessimist,Edward Albee keeps trying to evoke the ethical consciousness from among the whole nation and society with his unique techniques and preposterous stories,which also reflects his concern about human existence and fate.