Jeeves and Wooster Style, Origins and Influences

This Creative Writing thesis consists of two parts: a creative component (a comic novel entitled The Code of the Buskers); and a critical component (entitled Jeeves and Wooster: Style, Origins and Influences). The Code of the Buskers is a loose homage to the Jeeves and Wooster books by P.G. Wodehouse. It is a richly intertextual work which connects not only to many Wodehouse tropes and techniques, but also to cultural reference points of its own era of the late 1980s and to the classical sources which the critical component will argue inspired Wodehouse to create the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Specifically, the thesis proposes that Wodehouse’s comedic pairing has origins in the master-servant relationship depicted between Dionysus and Xanthias in Frogs by Aristophanes, and demonstrates that the characters Jeevie and Bert in my novel are more than just reinventions of Jeeves and Wooster, for they also revive elements of that same classical heritage and demonstrate its enduring comedic validity