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John O'Donovan (1921-85) - Irish playwright, journalist, scholar, broadcaster, raconteur, and wit - has been described as "the despair of his enemies, the delight of his friends, and sometimes vice versa." He was probably the most witty, literate, and learned Irish dramatist to appear after the Second World War; and the four plays contained in this volume present him at his most thoughtful, ribald, and moving. His Abbey Theatre play Copperfaced Jack is a rich tragicomedy about the tormented and Falstaffian Lord Clonmell in the turbulent revolutionary years following 1798. His Abbey play The Shaws of Synge Street is about the tumultuous and musical family and friends of the young Bernard Shaw...
However, these contemporary accounts are frequently amplified and put into modern perspective, particularly at crucial moments such as a major production, a final production, or a death. The authors have particularly done so with writers of some importance such as Edward Martyn, William Boyle, or T.C. Murray. Since the theater of these years was especially influenced by the state of the country, the authors give considerable space to the disruptive political events of the times. Always, however, this is done from the particular vantage point of the theater and its workers, for the Irish theater vigorously reacted to and quickly assimilated the turbulent political events of the day: the raids, the reprisals, the burnings, and the murders. These 1,800 days really break into two periods. The first comprises the violence of the Black and Tan War, the exhaustion that led to the treaty, and the bitterness occasioned by the treaty that led to the culminating ferocity of the civil war.
Patrick Delany's reputation as a scholar and tutor at Trinity College, Dublin, and an influential preacher in his time, apologist for Church of Ireland causes, and foremost defender of Jonathan Swift against the criticisms and slanders of Lord Orrery is well documented. The purpose of this edition is to establish an authoritative text to show what sort of poet Delany is, why we should read his poems, and to claim for him a position of importance as an eighteenth-century Irish poet.
Stuart's study approaches the subject primarily from the viewpoint of literary criticism but also includes production history, providing the reader with a useful look at theatre practices. Additionally, insight is provided into the popular taste and imagination of different periods and cultures, as reflected in changing representations of the vampire, from the relative innocence of the Romantics to the evolving patterns of sadism, misogyny, and xenophobia of the end of the century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Dion Boucicault: London AssuranceW. S. Gilbert: EngagedEdward Bulwer-Lytton: MoneyHenry James: The High BidOxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographiesilluminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University
Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figur...
The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph was hugely popular in circulating libraries in the years after its publication, and its emotional intensity was often remarked upon; Samuel Johnson wrote to Frances Sheridan, “I know not, Madam! that you have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so much.” Sheridan traces Sidney Bidulph’s development in a complex epistolary novel spanning much of the protagonist’s life, and explores the tension between sexual desire and prescribed female conduct. In addition to an introduction that places the novel in the context of Sheridan’s feminism and of the early novel, this edition provides material on discourses of female conduct, letters between Sheridan and Samuel Richardson, and contemporary reviews.