Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

1971

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Abstract

Four plays by Robert E. Sherwood--The Road to Rome, The Petrified Forest, Idiot's Delight, and There Shall Be No Night--have protagonists who may be identified by the term "romantic idealist." They are "romantic" in that they are typically dissatisfied v1ith the present, nostalgic for the glory of the past, chivalrous in matters of the heart, irrational in their behavior, and intuitive in their judgments. Like the Byronic hero, they are capable of intense feeling. They are "idealistic" in that they hold to noble beliefs of a transcendent nature--honor, truth, freedom. Within Sherwood's plays there is a movement toward ever purer manifestations of idealism, culminating in the idealistically pure (but dramatically simplistic) characterization of Dr. Valkonen in There Shall Be No Night.

Extent

72 p.

Comments

FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 1971.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Identifier

FADT13441

Format

pdf

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