DESCRIPTION : In this book Nicholas Grene explores
political contexts for some of the outstanding Irish plays from
the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. The politics
of Irish drama have previously been considered primarily the
politics of national self-expression.
Here it is argued that Irish
plays, in their self-conscious representation of the otherness
of Ireland, are outwardly directed towards audiences both at
home and abroad. The political dynamics of such relations between
plays and audiences is the book's multiple subject : the
stage interpretation of Ireland from « The Shaughraun »
[Dion Boucicault] to « Translations » [Brian
Friel] ; the contentious stage images of Yeats, Gregory
and Synge ; reactions to revolution from O'Casey to Behan ;
the post-colonial worlds of « Purgatory »
[Yeats] and « All that Fall » [Beckett] ;
the imagined Irelands of Friel and Murphy, McGuinness and Barry.
With its fundamental reconception of the politics of Irish drama,
this book represents a new view of the phenomenon of Irish drama
itself. ❙
Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature at Trinity College,
Dublin ; he has lectured widely on Irish literature and is the
author of Synge : A Critical Study of the Plays (1975), Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière : The Comic Contract (1980), Bernard Shaw : A Critical View (1984) and Shakespeare's Tragic Imagination (1992).
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