Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play PDF Download

Author: Alexandra Poulain
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349949639
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book discusses Irish Passion plays (plays that rewrite or parody the story of the Passion of Christ) in modern Irish drama from the Irish Literary Revival to the present day. It offers innovative readings of such canonical plays as J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats’s Calvary, Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Brian Friel’s Faith Healer and Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire, as well as of less well-known plays by Padraic Pearse, Lady Gregory, G. B. Shaw, Seán O’Casey, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett and David Lloyd. Challenging revisionist readings of the rhetoric of “blood sacrifice” and martyrdom in the Irish Republican tradition, it argues that the Passion play is a powerful political genre which centres on the staged death of the (usually male) protagonist, and makes visible the usually invisible violence perpetrated both by colonial power and by the postcolonial state in the name of modernity.

Author: R. F. Foster
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245926
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
A masterful history of Ireland’s Easter Rising told through the lives of ordinary people who forged a revolutionary generation. On Easter Monday, 1916, Irish rebels poured into Dublin’s streets to proclaim an independent republic. Ireland’s long struggle for self-government had suddenly become a radical and bloody fight for independence from Great Britain. Irish nationalists mounted a week-long insurrection, occupying public buildings and creating mayhem before the British army regained control. The Easter Rising provided the spark for the Irish revolution, a turning point in the violent history of Irish independence. In this highly original history, acclaimed scholar R. F. Foster explores the human dimension of this pivotal event. He focuses on the ordinary men and women, Yeats’s “vivid faces,” who rose “from counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses” and took to the streets. A generation made, not born, they rejected the inherited ways of the Church, their bourgeois families, and British rule. They found inspiration in the ideals of socialism and feminism, in new approaches to love, art, and belief. Drawing on fresh sources, including personal letters and diaries, Foster summons his characters to life. We meet Rosamond Jacob, who escaped provincial Waterford for bustling Dublin. On a jaunt through the city she might visit a modern art gallery, buy cigarettes, or read a radical feminist newspaper. She could practice the Irish language, attend a lecture on Freud, or flirt with a man who would later be executed for his radical activity. These became the roots of a rich life of activism in Irish and women’s causes. Vivid Faces shows how Rosamond and her peers were galvanized to action by a vertiginous sense of transformation: as one confided to his diary, “I am changing and things around me change.” Politics had fused with the intimacies of love and belief, making the Rising an event not only of the streets but also of the hearts and minds of a generation.

Author: Ruán O'Donnell
Publisher: The O'Brien Press Ltd
ISBN: 1847178537
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
On 24 April 1916, as President of the Provisional Government, Patrick Pearse appeared under the GPO Grand Portico on Dublin's O'Connell Street and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Nine days later, he was the first of the rebel leaders to be executed. Pearse was born in Dublin on 11 November 1879, to an English father and an Irish mother. Considered the face of the 1916 Easter Rising, for many he was also its heart. In this definitive biography, using a wealth of primary sources, Dr Ruán O'Donnell establishes as never before the significance of Pearse's activism all across Ireland, as well as his dual roles as Director of Military Operations for the Irish Volunteers and member of the clandestine Military Council of the IRB. On 3 May 1916, Pearse was executed in the Stonebreakers Yard at Kilmainham Gaol, at the age of thirty-six.

Author: Nicholas Grene
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191016349
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 952

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the single most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than forty contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre. Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett; Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also wrote for the stage). This collection begins with the influence of melodrama, and looks at arguably the first modern Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, before moving into a series of considerations of the Abbey Theatre, and Irish modernism. Arranged chronologically, it explores areas such as women in theatre, Irish-language theatre, and alternative theatres, before reaching the major writers of more recent Irish theatre, including Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, and their successors. There are also individual chapters focusing on Beckett and Shaw, as well as a series of chapters looking at design, acting, and theatre architecture. The book concludes with an extended survey of the critical literature on the field. In each chapter, the author does not simply rehearse accepted wisdom; all of the contributors push the boundaries of their respective fields, so that each chapter is a significant contribution to scholarship in its own right.

Author: Róisín Ní Ghairbhí
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
ISBN: 1847177484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Willie Pearse was a well-regarded sculptor who ran the family stone-carving business, but he was also a dynamic activist whose life offers fresh insights into political and cultural life before 1916. History has placed him in the shadow of his brother Patrick, but whether it was nationalism, education or the cultural revival, Willie shared in these activities as an equal. Being Patrick's right-hand man in the weeks preceding the Rising, he played an important role in making it happen. His gentle character and wide circle of friends meant that his execution on 4 May 1916 shocked even those who had little sympathy with the rebels and helped turn public opinion in their favour. In this book, using new sources, Róisin Ní Ghairbhi shows conclusively that, far from being dominated by his brother, Willie Pearse was always decidedly his own man.

Author: Gregory Castle
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653891
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O’Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland that simultaneously recounted the heroic ancient past of the Irish people and helped to usher in a new era of cultural revival and political upheaval. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries, from W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory to Patrick Pearse. Despite the profound influence O’Grady’s writings had on literary and political culture in Ireland, they are not as well known as they should be, particularly in view of the increasingly global interest in Irish culture. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in History of Ireland—the rise of the young warrior, his famous exploits in the Táin Bó Cualinge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and his heroic death. Castle and Bixby’s edition also includes a scholarly introduction, biography, timeline, glossary, editorial notes, and critical essays, demonstrating the significance of O’Grady’s writing for the continued reimagining of Ireland’s past, present, and future. Inviting a new generation of readers to encounter this work, the volume provides the tools necessary to appreciate both O’Grady’s enduring importance as a writer and Cuculain’s continuing resonance as a cultural icon.

Author: Gregory Castle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316819612
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description
A History of Irish Modernism examines a wide variety of artworks (from the 1890s to the 1970s), including examples from literature, film, painting, music, radio, and architecture. Each chapter considers a particular aspect of Irish culture and reflects on its contribution to modernism at large. In addition to new research on the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism, which places them squarely in the modernist arena, chapters offer transnational and transdisciplinary perspectives that place Irish cultural production in new contexts. At the same time, the historical standpoint adopted in each chapter enables the contributors to examine how modernist practices developed across geographical and temporal distances. A History of Irish Modernism thus attests to the unique development of modernism in Ireland - driven by political as well as artistic concerns - even as it embodies aesthetic principles that are the hallmark of modernism in Europe, the Americas and beyond.

Author: Padraic Pearse
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780716531555
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This first complete edition of Patrick Pearse's extant plays (in English and Irish) also includes his most significant writings about the nature of the theatre in early 20th-century Ireland. His plays were highlights of the Cultural Revival and drew a who's who of literary and political figures to productions in St. Enda's, the Abbey Theatre, and Jones Road (Croke Park) in the years preceding the 1916 Easter Rising. Each work is annotated and illustrated with contemporary photographs, and each is placed in its historical, social, and political contexts. The book makes Pearse's plays readily available to those wishing to stage productions, and it also provides a complete reference source for those who seek a better understanding one of the iconic figures of the Easter Rising. The annotated plays and commentary provide fascinating insights into the cultural, imaginative, and intellectual life and times of a man who helped shape one of the defining moments in Irish history. Pearse's essays on the subject of the theatre and its role in the cultural work of Irish nationalism are also included. *** "[the book] draws attention to an often neglected aspect of the career of a man whose contemporary significance and subsequent legacy remains disputed almost one hundred years after his death....the editors are to be particularly commended for their bilingual, multidisciplinary approach to Pearse's work as a dramatist....the collection is consequently a major contribution to 'the momentum building towards the centenary year of 2016.' - Irish Literary Supplement, Vol.34, No.1, Fall 2014Ã?Â?Ã?Â?

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description

Author: Roisín Higgins
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
P.H. Pearse is one of the most contested figures in Irish history and, as an abstracted and abused icon, he has become increasingly detached from the writings and actions of the man. Despite his influence over twentieth-century Irish history and culture, Pearse has been under-studied in recent decades. This volume of essays redresses this academic imbalance and provides a long-overdue study. The Life and After-Life of P.H. Pearse brings together the work of an exciting range of leading contemporary scholars, such as Declan Kiberd, Joost Augusteijn, Angela Bourke and Thomas Hennessey. The book examines personal and family influences and reassesses Pearse as an educationalist, journalist, Irish language advocate, short story writer, radical thinker and political figure. The book revisits the life of Pearse with a view to his relevance to present day theories and teachings on history, language, literature and culture and presents a complete critical work in the lead up to the 100 year commemoration of his death.