National Identity in Irish Drama. A Study of Selected Plays by Yeats, Synge and O'Casey PDF Download

Author: Youssef Al-Youssef
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 365691012X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Document from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: This book comes as a continuation to the previous book with the same title, but this time, with ten plays and a broader discussion of the previously discussed ones. In this book, many specialised people have worked hard in order to answer the ongoing debates in the literary field. It deals with the most abstract idea in the Irish Theater: Nation Identity. It studies ten plays by three dramatisits and gives insight for analysing other plays. The presented plays are as following: - The Countess Cathleen - Cathleen Ni Houlihan - Purgatory - Riders to the Sea - The Playboy of the Western World - The Well of the Saints - Juno and the Paycock - The Plough and the Stars - The Shadow of Gunman - The Silver Tassie

Author: Inken Schulze
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638681300
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,85, Technical University of Braunschweig (Englisches Seminar/Abteilung für Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften der Terchnischen Universität Braunschweig), 63 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: “There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature” (John O’Leary) Although the high age of imperialism is thought to have started in the late 1870s, this does not hold true for English-speaking areas. Ireland, having been colonised by the English well over seven hundred years before, is an exception as England's oldest colony. In the course of time, all native features of the Irish, above all their Celtic history, had to give way to the colonisers' equivalents. It was not until the nineteenth century that the Irish developed a new national consciousness. It eventually enabled them to lay claim to their native history, religion and language as well as their national identity embodied in all of these aspects. In this respect, the Irish Literary Revival is particularly decisive since its writers dedicated themselves to a new way of dramatic expression. This thesis focuses on the three key writers of the literary movement William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), John Millington Synge (1871-1909) and Sean O’Casey (1880-1964). While concentrating on a revival of the Irish past, each spreading their own version of Irishness throughout the theatres, they helped Irish literature to become Irish, to become national again.

Author: George Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135855978
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This study examines the early dramatic works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory in the context of late colonial Ireland’s unique socio-political landscape. By contextualizing each author’s work within the artistic and political discourses of their time, Cusack demonstrates the complex negotiation of nationalism, class, and gender identities undertaken by these three authors in the years leading up to Ireland’s revolution against England. Furthermore, by focusing on plays written by each author in the context of the ongoing debates over Irish national identity that were taking place throughout Irish public life in this period, Cusack examines in more depth than previous studies the ways Yeats, Gregory, and Synge adapted conventional dramatic and linguistic forms to accommodate the conflicting claims of Irish nationalism. In so doing, he demonstrates the contribution these authors made not only to the development of Irish nationalism but also to modern and postcolonial literature as we understand them today.

Author: Fabio Luppi
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 162734697X
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre demonstrates how the literary archetype of the clash between fathers and sons and the subsequent depiction of anti-oedipal figures become a major concern for the playwrights writing in a specific and crucial moment of Irish history (1904-1938). The father can be conceived both as a historical / political metaphor as well as a real father in a specific historical and social context. The classical models employed as theoretical tools to nuance the argument--Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus, Aeneas and Anchises, Priam and Hector, Hector and Astyanax--are challenged by the Christian example of Abraham and Isaac, subversively adjusted by Yeats to provide a tragic reading of post-colonial Ireland. All of these pairings provide archetypes for the understanding of complex personal and familial dynamics. The book takes into consideration not only the most famous figures of the Irish National Theatre--as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, and Sean O?Casey?but also overlooked authors such as T.C. Murray, Padraic Colum, Paul Vincent Carroll, Lennox Robinson, Denis Johnston, George Shiels, St. John Ervine, Teresa Deevy. Many commentators have written about the playwrights of the Abbey Theatre, mainly focusing on politics, social classes, Irish identity, cultural issues, and linguistic aspects: no thorough analysis of the clash between generations has been published so far. Those who have tackled the issue have devoted their attention to a single author, or to a single aspect; this study aims to demonstrate that the repeated occurrence of anti-oedipal figures and of the archetype of the clash between fathers and sons?a clear manifestation of the need of emancipation from oppressive authorities and of change in Irish society?must be read as a common phenomenon and as a shared concern. The book is written for people interested in Irish studies, post-colonial studies, and theatre studies.

Author: Stephen Watt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253214195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
This book traces a significant shift in 20th century Irish theatre from the largely national plays produced in Dublin to a more expansive international art form. Confirmed by the recent success outside of Ireland of the "third wave" of Irish playwrights writing in the 1990s, the new Irish drama has encouraged critics to reconsider both the early national theatre and the dramatic tradition it fostered. On the occasion of the centenary of the first professional production of the Irish Literary Theatre, the contributors to this volume investigate contemporary Irish drama's aesthetic features and socio-political commitments and re-read the plays produced earlier in the century. Although these essayists cover a wide range of topics, from the productions and objectives of the Abbey Theatre's first rivals to mid-century theatre festivals, to plays about the "Troubles" in the North, they all reassess the oppositions so commonplace in critical discussions of Irish drama: nationalism vs. internationalism, high vs. low culture, urban experience vs. rural or peasant life. A Century of Irish Drama includes essays on such figures as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Read, Martin McDonagh, and many more. Stephen Watt is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage, Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre, and essays on Irish and Irish-American culture. He has also written extensively on higher education, most recently Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (with Cary Nelson). Eileen M. Morgan is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently working on Sean O'Faolain's biographies of De Valera and on Edna O'Brien's 1990s trilogy, and is preparing a book-length study on the influence of radio in Ireland. Shakir Mustafa is a Visiting Instructor in the English department at Indiana University. His work has appeared in such journals as New Hibernia Review and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and he is now translating Arabic short stories into English. Drama and Performance Studies--Timothy Wiles, general editor

Author: Gaby Frey
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
ISBN: 3772055346
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
In Brian Friel's writing, the distinction between public and private is closely linked to the concepts of home, family, identity and truth. This study examines the characters' excessive introspection and their deep-seated need to disclose their most intimate knowledge and private truths to define who they are and, thus, to oppose dominant discourse or avoid heteronomy. This study begins by investigating how a number of Anglo-Irish writers publicised their characters' private versions of truth thereby illustrating what they perceived to be the space of 'Irishness'. The book then focuses on Friel's techniques of sharing his character's private views to demonstrate how he adopted and adapted these practices in his own oeuvre. As the characters' superficial inarticulateness and their vivid inner selves are repeatedly juxtaposed in Friel's texts, his oeuvre, quintessentially, displays a great unease with the concepts of communication and absolute truth.

Author: GRZEGORZ KONECZNIAK
Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika
ISBN: 8323136998
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book, whose slashed part of the title refers to Allen Tate’s idea of poetic tension, “derived from lopping the prefixes off the logical terms extension and intension” (Tate 1938: 283; italics in the original; see also Markowski 2006: 140–141), addresses various dimensions of prompting and its techniques preserved in the old play scripts of the Abbey Theatre. They were both encoded inside the plots of the dramatic works and inscribed on the pages of the unique typographical, textual and graphic composite constructs. The research presented stems from an exploration of the duality of intention and tension within literary and editorial studies. The two concepts relate to the thematic dimensions (the motif of tension in literature) as well as theoretical literary and textual problems (the question of intent and intention in literary interpretation and editorial research). “Tension” and “intention” in literature have been considered in various manners depending on a given theoretical approach. Their treatment should require a specific approach and methodology if literary works – plays, to be more specific – subject to a critical and interpretative examination are encapsulated within the unique forms of manuscripts whose original function was to guide the stage managers, prompters, or actors through the complex process of rehearsing and producing dramas at the theatre.

Author: Christopher Murray
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719041570
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Murray provides an overview of a nation's theatre read in the light of a nation's self-definition. Mediating between history and its troubled relation with politics and art, he shows the preoccupations of Irish drama.

Author: Ronald Gene Rollins
Publisher: Academica Press,LLC
ISBN: 1930901267
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
This monograph explores the development of Irish drama in the 20th century and discusses recent cultural critiques of the entire enterprise of the Irish theatre. Rollins interprets Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Friel and McGuiness among others as practitioners in a kind of national reformulation of ritual and memory. This is one of the most thorough one volume discussions of the greatest century of Irish dramatic creativity and influence. "...I am impressed with the critical writing in Ronald Rollins's RUIN, RITUAL AND REMBRANCE. His scholarship focuses on Ireland's intricate history and Yeat's definition of maimed Irish space " great hatred, little room." Rollins deals with three playwrights, Sean O'Casey, Denis Johnston and the contemporary Frank McGuiness and their response to the nationalist uprising of 1916. Rollins points up after artful consideration of the older dramatists, the special relevance of McGuiness' idea that the Ulster rebels of pre World War 1 are the same as the Dublin rebels of 1916, the flip side of the coin. These writer see each denomination in Ireland as ordinary, half inspired, half bigoted human beings curiously united in their defiant rhetoric. The central thrust of the study is a consideration of the nationalist poet/playwright and leader Patrick Pearse as a man lost in the labyrinth of revolutionary rhetoric; in Rollins approach to McGuiness' THE SONS OF ULSTER MARCHING TOWARDS THE SOMME, Rollins argues the proposition that the character Piper is a counter figure to Pearse, similarly involved in the ritual chants of war, youth and death. The difference is that the real life Pearse shot by the British survives as an icon of Irish republicanism while the fictional Piper lives to see the Protestant house of Ulster crumble. Rollin's work is full of insights like this. Buy the book." ---James Liddy " ...highly recommended." Professor Robert Mahony-Catholic University of America

Author: Christopher Murray
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773586156
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
Se?O'Casey was the quintessential Dublin playwright. In critical works that include his Dublin Trilogy - The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, and The Plough and the Stars - he portrayed the traumatic birth of a nation and delved into the Irish national character. Christopher Murray's Se?O'Casey: Writer at Work takes a fresh look at the last of the great writers of the Irish literary revival.