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Irish literature's roots have been traced to the 7th-9th century. This is a rich and hardy literature starting with descriptions of the brave deeds of kings, saints and other heroes. These were followed by generous veins of religious, historical, genealogical, scientific and other works. The development of prose, poetry and drama raced along with the times. Modern, well-known Irish writers include: William Yeats, James Joyce, Sean Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, John Synge and Samuel Beckett.
"Michael Pierse is Lecturer in Irish literature at Queen's University Belfast. His research mainly explores the writing and cultural production of Irish working-class life. Over recent years this work has expanded into new multidisciplinary themes and international contexts, including the study of festivals, digital methodologies in public humanities and theatre-as-research practices. Michael has contributed to a range of national and international publications, is the author of Writing Ireland's Working Class: Dublin after O'Casey (2011), and has been awarded several Arts and Humanities Research Council awards and the Vice Chancellor's Award at Queen's"--
Christopher Murray's work on Sean O'Casey is a critical biography. In addition to the normal biographical elements, Dr Murray provides a strong interpretative context for the life. For example, he looks afresh at the Dublin of the 1880s and 1890s in order to provide an updated background to O'Casey's childhood. He pays a great deal of attention to the political situation from 1880 to 1922, setting it against O'Casey's own treatment in his six volumes of autobiography. In general he attempts to establish O'Casey's Ireland.This leads naturally to a fresh examination of the great Dublin trilogy, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, the three works on which O'Casey's reputation stands. The rejection of his next play, The Silver Tassie, by the Abbey Theatre precipitated O'Casey's move to England.
This book is an anthology focused on Shaw’s efforts, literary and political, that worked toward a modernizing Ireland. Following Declan Kiberd’s Foreword and the editor’s Introduction, the contributing chapters, in their order of appearance, are from President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, Anthony Roche, David Clare, Elizabeth Mannion, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Aisling Smith, Susanne Colleary, Audrey McNamara, Aileen R. Ruane, Peter Gahan, and Gustavo A. Rodriguez Martin. The essays establish that Shaw’s Irishness was inherent and manifested itself in his work, demonstrating that Ireland was a recurring feature in his considerations. Locating Shaw within the march towards modernizing Ireland furthers the recent efforts to secure Shaw’s place within the Irish spheres of literature and politics.
Ireland’s Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O’Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, and Juno and the Paycock. Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbey repertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a...
Based on extensive archival research, this open access book examines the poetics and politics of the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) over the first three decades of its existence, discussing some of its remarkable productions in the comparative contexts of avant-garde theatre, Hollywood cinema, popular culture, and the development of Irish-language theatre, respectively. The overarching objective is to consider the output of the Gate in terms of cultural convergence the dynamics of exchange, interaction, and acculturation that reveal the workings of transnational infrastructures.
Examines the life and writings of William Butler Yeats, including a biographical sketch, detailed synopses of his works, social and historical influences, and more.
Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) was a pioneering writer in the genre of fantasy literature and the author of such celebrated works as The Book of Wonder (1912) and The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924). Over the course of a career that spanned more than five decades, Dunsany wrote thousands of stories, plays, novels, essays, poems, and reviews, and his work was translated into more than a dozen languages. Today, Dunsany’s work is experiencing a renaissance, as many of his earlier works have been reprinted and much attention has been paid to his place in the history of fantasy and supernatural literature. This bibliography is a revision of the landmark volume published in 19...
With five Nobel Prize-winners, seven Pulitzer Prize-winners and two Booker Prize-winning novelists, modern Irish writing has contributed something special and permanent to our understanding of the twentieth century. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century provides a useful, comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume. Organized chronologically by decade, this anthology provides the reader with a unique sense of the development and richness of Irish writing and of the society it reflected. It embraces all forms of writing, not only the major forms of drama, fiction and verse, but such material as travel writing, personal memoirs, journalism, intervi...
Drawing on the archives of libraries in Dublin, New York City, and Boston, Albert J. DeGiacomo assesses T. C. Murray's contribution to the Irish dramatic movement. One of "the Cork realists" of the Abbey Theatre, Murray wrote seventeen plays in one, two, or three acts. A prominent National Teacher and a seemingly apolitical playwright in the Irish Literary Revival, Murray expressed nationalistic aspirations in his peasant tragedies. His characters' drive for self-determination and their religious consciousness mark Murray's dramatic landscape.