Tom Stoppard: Bucking the Postmodern

Tom Stoppard is justly famous for his innovative theatrical techniques. Daniel Jernigan argues that while much of Tom Stoppard's early work (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound, for instance) is postmodern, the remainder of his career essentially tracks backward from there--becoming "late modernist" in the 1970s (Travesties) and fully modernist in the 80s and 90s (The Real Thing and Arcadia). This pattern also makes sense of Stoppard's recent and uncharacteristic foray into dramatic realism with The Coast of Utopia (2002) and Rock 'n' Roll (2006), at which point the playwright seems to embrace the more straightforward rhetorical advantages of literary realism.