COMEDY

146 GLOSSARYto problematize the idea of history, pointing out that textual accountsof the historical past are themselves texts and therefore susceptible tothe same principles of inclusion and exclusion, elision and omission,as any other form of text and not necessarily imbued with any inherentauthority. New historicism came into being largely through the workof American literary critics in the 1980s.Old Comedy represented solely by the works of Greek playwrightAristophanes (c. 448–380 BC), Old Comedy represents the firstrecognizably comic narrative in Western literature. Characterized byloose plotting, fantastic situations, and scatological and slanderoushumour, Old Comedy is thought to be derived in part from forms ofancient worship, especially in honour of the god Dionysus.Pantomime used in the seventeenth century to describe a story told indance, the British pantomime developed as an offshoot of Harlequinplays, themselves a variant of commedia dell’arte performances.Pantomime was developed in the nineteenth century, using classicfairy tale plots as a loose framework for a broader range of elementsincluding songs, music hall routines, trick scenery, audienceparticipation, acrobatics, slapstick, costume changes, and romance. Afurther convention of pantomime is its use of young women in the leadmale role (the ‘principal boy’) and older men playing the parts ofmature women, such as Cinderella’s ugly sisters (known as‘pantomime dames’). Pantomime was associated with Christmas veryearly on in its existence, and is still a popular part of the BritishChristmas season.Postmodernism a controversial and much-debated term, now largelyunderstood to refer to creative or critical practices that reject totalizingmeta-narratives and celebrate complexity, self-reflexivity,fragmentation, doubt, ambiguity, relativism, and pastiche. The termreceived its earliest use in relation to architecture, particularlyarchitectural styles that eschewed the monumentalist and technocraticaesthetics of Modernism, appearing instead to favour process overproduct and the witty quotation and incorporation of numerousarchitectural features rather than subordination to one monolithicconcept of the new. Postmodernist effects in literature and art generallydraw attention to the concepts of form and artifice, rather than hidingthem, and reject notions of transparency or intentionality ininterpretation. Postmodernism has been viewed as many things,including a reaction against the idea of history as ‘progress’, an ideait credits in part with the development of ideologies that have led tofascism and Stalinism.