Breaking the Bounds: British Feminist Dramatists Writing in the Mainstream since c. 1980

Breaking the Bounds focuses on second-wave feminism as a rupture in an unbroken episteme of Western patriarchy analyzed with regard to British dramatic discourse. The theoretical framework is a genealogy of patriarchy deploying and developing Foucault’s ideas on discourse to apply to a deconstruction of Western patriarchy. An analysis of feminist drama texts is used to support the argument that Western patriarchy consists of one unbroken episteme as the patriarchal impulse substrates the epistemological breaks indicated by Foucault. The theoretical text speaks of the twentieth-century feminist rupture from patriarchy, analyzing in detail the texts of five mainstream feminist dramatists who have successfully effected an intervention in the British grand récit of undeniably male dramatic discourse.