Point of view in drama: a socio-pragmatic analysis of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle

In spite of its success with poetry and prose texts, stylistics has only recently discovered adequate models for the analysis of drama. In the past, there have been too many factors to take into account, which meant that stylisticians often had to ignore performance in favour of playtext, or treat the script as an idealisation of a performance when drawing on pragmatic and sociolinguistic frameworks of language use in context. Dan McIntyre here returns to useful work on point of view in order to present a rigorous analysis of Dennis Potter’s play. Of course, this also leads the discussion into a stylistic engagement with the notion of character, which is another area in which stylistic attention has recently produced useful work.