Word: mercilessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Britain. Both are prolific (Ayckbourn, 48, has written more than 30 plays), popular with mainstream audiences, observant of middle-class absurdities and almost compulsively funny, no matter how dark the underlying theme. The key difference: Simon has a forgiving, generous spirit toward his characters, while Ayckbourn is increasingly merciless. Audiences pause amid laughter and abruptly realize that the landscape is blasted. Ayckbourn borrowed this technique, if not much else, from Chekhov, and at his best -- as in Season's Greetings, Time and Time Again and Woman in Mind -- uses it just as effectively...
Like these predecessors, Wolfe is a master of social satire; he is, in fact, the best of his generation. Bonfire is merciless and unrelenting in its depiction of New York as a city driven by ethnic and racial hostility, political ambition and status. What of idealism, ethics and refined impulses? In the words of one fulsome character, "fuhgedaboudit." Action is motivated by the seven deadly sins, distributed evenhandedly among the city's blacks, Irish, Jews and that overlooked minority, the rich Wasps...
Jeremy C. Miller confronts the anti-Semitism problem by playing the hated Shylock with a measure of dignity. Portrayals of Shylock have a tendency to paint him as a bloodthirsty, raving madman, and while Miller's Shylock is appropriately vengeful and merciless, he also rarely loses his cool. He demands the justice and respect he deserves as a man but is denied because of his religion. He pleads. "If You prick us [Jews]. do we not bleed...
...devoted fan and a merciless editor can each make harsh demands on a writer. For Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will...
...American Literature, for example, a finite number of novelists and poets have suffered from merciless analysis in countless volumes of criticism, biography and comparison. Students seeking thesis topics must pick ever more obscure subjects for their original research, making the theses themselves increasingly abstruse and unreadable...