Abstract
When Auden’s first properly published collection, Poems, appeared in 1930, it was prefaced by a short verse play called Paid on Both Sides. The piece had previously appeared in The Criterion in January of the same year, through T. S. Eliot’s enthusiastic patronage. John Fuller calls the play ‘a major influence on English poetic drama of the ‘thirties’, and places it alongside Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes. Yet at the same time he acknowledges that it owes little to Eliot, and concedes that the play has rarely been performed.1
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Notes
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).
Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden: A Biography (London: Allcn & Unwin, 1981), p. 172. Yet whether the feet simply represent instinct and reason, as he claims, remains questionable. This view might itself be class-biased.
Sigmund Freud, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction , On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, The Pelican Freud Library, xi (15 vols.; London: Pelican, 1984), pp. 59–97.
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© 2000 Rainer Emig
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Emig, R. (2000). Libidinous Charades: The Auden-Isherwood Plays. In: W. H. Auden. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286979_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286979_3
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