The Late Harold Pinter

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: On the Meaning of Late, Affect, and Aestheticizing Politics

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 1-29

3. The ‘Early’ Years: A ‘More Precisely Political’ Drama

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 31-69

4. Political Drama through the 1990s and After: Dialogue Is the Thing

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 71-115

5. The Political Verse: A Poetics of Force

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 117-148

6. A ‘Citizen of the World’: Aestheticizing Politics

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 149-183

7. The Nobel Lecture: Artist and Citizen Converge

   • Basil Chiasson

   Pages 185-218

8. Back Matter

   Pages 219-245

   PDF

This volume is the first to provide a book-length study of Pinter’s overtly political activity. With chapters on political drama, poetry, and speeches, it charts a consistent tension between aesthetics and politics through Pinter’s later career and defines the politics of the work in terms of a pronounced sensory dimension and capacity to affect audiences. The book brings to light unpublished letters and drafts from the Pinter Archive in the British Library and draws his political poems and speeches, which have previously been overshadowed by his plays, into the foreground. Intended for students, instructors, and researchers in drama and theatre, performance studies, literature, and media studies, this book celebrates Pinter’s later life and work by discerning a coherent political voice and project and by registering the complex ways that project troubles the divide between aesthetics and politics.

• British playwright
• twentieth-century theatre
• political poetry
• political aethetics
• activist poetry
• Nobel lecture
• Art, Truth and Politics
• British and Irish Literature

“This book was very well written, and Chiasson went above and beyond to explain to readers how Pinter’s later works used both affect and aesthetics to convey their messages. … this book would be important to anyone who wants to study politics, poetics, rhetoric, and the media. This could be a particularly good book for a class that is studying media and politics.” (Katy Johnson, CBQ Communication Booknotes Quarterly, Vol. 49 (2), 2018)

• University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom

  Basil Chiasson

Basil Chiasson is Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is a member of the AHRC-funded ‘Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies’ research team. Previous publications include contributions to Modern Drama, The Theatre of Harold Pinter and Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter.

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