Title of Look Back in Anger

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John Osborne's Look Back in Anger is one of a handful of plays which have attained iconic status, becoming a symbolic work which means much more than the message of the play. Look Back in Anger can be examined not as a literary text or performance event but as a myth factory. The anger at the centre of the play depends on non-verbal signs such as emotionality, and John Osborne and his anti-hero Jimmy Porter became fused in the public mind into a symbolic figure, the Angry Young Man – a crucial ingredient in making Look Back in Anger part of a narrative of cultural revolution, in which a play mainly concerned with a problematic love affair turns into a political statement. LBA is a play that is also the standard bearer of the Kitchen-Sink genre. The previous trend in Victorian theater had been to depict the lives of the wealthy members of the ruling classes. These classes of people were often conservative in their politics and their ideologies.The Kitchen Sink drama sought, instead, to bring the real lives and social inequality of ordinary working class people to the stage. The lives of these people were caught between struggles of power, industry, politics, and social homogenization. A central concept in the title is “anger” and it needs to be properly conceptualized. This seemingly ignoble emotion can also be a weapon of self-assertion because it is excited by a sense of wrong. People are bound to be angry when mistreated or when others refuse to obey social laws. Thus anger is a sociological and philosophical issue, an emotion (thus psychological) that can be triggered by social injustice such as anger at racism or sexism. Anger in this case falls into what Grasso regards as “vital political tool. It enables new perspectives, new understanding of oppressive conditions that had previously remained unquestioned”. In other words, “anger” is a product of social

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