You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The volume includes productions from the 1899 founding of the Irish Literary Theatre through the April 1916 Easter Rising, when British martial law significantly altered the course of Irish drama.".
This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unearthed, stretching from its 1894 roots via W. B. Yeats’ dream of Shaw as a menacing, yet grinning sewing machine, to Shaw’s and O’Casey’s 1928 masterworks. In the process, Shaw’s War Issues for Irishmen, Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, Saint Joan, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, and O’Casey’s The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, and The Silver Tassie are reconsidered, revealing previously undiscovered textures to the masterworks. All of which provides a rethinking, a reconsideration of Ireland’s great drama of the 1920s, as well as furthering the knowledge of Shaw, O’Casey, and Connolly.
"The breadth of scholarship presented here is truly impressive not only in its scope but also in its deft integration. . . . This is a work that makes major contributions to several different fields: Irish culture, including early twentieth-century theatre, political and intellectual histories; Shaw studies; O'Casey scholarship; and the intersection of international socialist thought and nationalistic revolutionary action." --Gary Richardson, Professor of English, Mercer University, USA This book details the Irish socialistic tracks pursued by Bernard Shaw and Sean O'Casey, mostly after 1916, that were arguably impacted by the executed James Connolly. The historical context is carefully unea...
This study explores the personal, historical, and artistic influences that combined to form such dark and influential American masterpieces as 'The Iceman Cometh', 'The Emperor Jones', 'Mourning Becomes Electra', 'Hughie', and - arguably the finest tragedy ever written by an American - 'Long Day's Journey into Night'.
A thorough re-assessment of one of Ireland's major playwrights, J.M. Synge (1871-1909). Using much previously-undiscussed archival material, the book takes each of Synge's plays and prose works, tracing his journey from an early Romanticism to a later, more combative modernism.
Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.
This book charts how promotional campaigns in which Bernard Shaw participated were key crucibles within which agency and personality could re-negotiate their relationship to one another and to the consuming public. Concurrent with the rise of modern advertising, the creation of Shaw’s 'G.B.S.' public persona was achieved through masterful imitation of patent medicine marketing strategies and a shrewd understanding of the relationship between product and spokesman. Helping to enhance the visibility of his literary writing and dovetailing with his Fabian political activities, 'G.B.S.' also became a key figure in the evolution of testimonial endorsement and the professionalizing of modern advertising. The study analyzes multiple ad series in which Shaw was prominently featured that were occasions for self-promotion for both Shaw and the agencies, and presage the iconoclastic style of contemporary 'public personality' and techniques of celebrity marketing.
In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), Polish critic Jan Kott defines one purpose of scholarship in the humanities that summarises the chief aim of this project: ‘The writing of history and, above all, literary criticism can, and must, always be understood as an attempt to find in the past aspects of human experience that can shed light on the meaning of our own times’. That is precisely what From the ‘Troubles’ to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960–2023 attempts to do. Aided by the insights of Irish and Northern Irish playwrights, poets and novelists, this book uses America’s historical relationship with Ireland and Northern Ireland as a means of understanding the rise of Trum...
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 es...
This Handbook offers a multiform sweep of theoretical, historical, practical and personal glimpses into a landscape roughly characterised as contemporary Irish theatre and performance. Bringing together a spectrum of voices and sensibilities in each of its four sections — Histories, Close-ups, Interfaces, and Reflections — it casts its gaze back across the past sixty years or so to recall, analyse, and assess the recent legacy of theatre and performance on this island. While offering information, overviews and reflections of current thought across its chapters, this book will serve most handily as food for thought and a springboard for curiosity. Offering something different in its mix of themes and perspectives, so that previously unexamined surfaces might come to light individually and in conjunction with other essays, it is a wide-ranging and indispensable resource in Irish theatre studies.