The Irish Drama of Europe from Yeats to Beckett PDF Download

Author: Katharine Worth
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472510844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
This study provides a European perspective on the drama of Yeats and of the Irish playwrights – Wilde and Synge, O'Casey and Beckett – who share in the achievement of creating a modern 'drama of the interior'. Professor Worth traces in particular the influence of Maeterlinck, examining his 'static drama' in some detail. A dominant theme is the importance of total theatre techniques to the playwrights of the interior from Wilde in Salomé to O'Casey in plays like Cock-a-Doodle Dandy. Yeats is seen as the great pioneer, assimilating inspiration from the French, with Arthur Symons as guide, from Synge, from Gordon Craig and from the No drama, and evolving a modern technique for a drama of complex self-consciousness.

Author: Michael McAteer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521769116
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Michael McAteer examines the plays of W. B. Yeats, considering their place in European theatre during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This original study considers the relationship Yeats's work bore with those of the foremost dramatists of the period, drawing comparisons with Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello and Ernst Toller. It also shows how his plays addressed developments in theatre at the time, with regard to the Naturalist, Symbolist, Surrealist and Expressionist movements, and how symbolism identified Yeats's ideas concerning labour, commerce and social alienation. This book is invaluable to graduates and academics studying Yeats but also provides a fascinating account for those in Irish studies and in the wider field of drama.

Author: Anthony Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408166003
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The Irish Dramatic Revival was to radically redefine Irish theatre and see the birth of Ireland's national theatre, the Abbey, in 1904. From a consideration of such influential precursors as Boucicault and Wilde, Anthony Roche goes on to examine the role of Yeats as both founder and playwright, the one who set the agenda until his death in 1939. Each of the major playwrights of the movement refashioned that agenda to suit their own very different dramaturgies. Roche explores Synge's experimentation in the creation of a new national drama and considers Lady Gregory not only as a co-founder and director of the Abbey Theatre but also as a significant playwright. A chapter on Shaw outlines his important intervention in the Revival. O'Casey's four ground-breaking Dublin plays receive detailed consideration, as does the new Irish modernism that followed in the 1930s and which also witnessed the founding of the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The Companion also features interviews and essays by leading theatre scholars and practitioners Paige Reynolds, P.J. Mathews and Conor McPherson who provide further critical perspectives on this period of radical change in modern Irish theatre.

Author: Cathy Leeney
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9781433103322
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is the first book to examine the plays of five fascinating and creative women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day. How these playwrights dramatize violence and its impacts in political, social, and personal life is a central concern of this book. Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning, and Teresa Deevy re-model theatrical form, re-structuring action and narrative, and exploring closure as a way of disrupting audience expectation. Their plays create stage spaces and images that expose relationships of power and authority, and invite the audience to see the performance not as illusion, but as framed by the conventions and limits of theatrical representation. Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is suitable for courses in Irish theatre, women in theatre, gender and performance, dramaturgy, and Irish drama in the twentieth century as well as for those interested in women's work in theatre and in Irish theatre in the twentieth century.

Author: Kevin Branigan
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039113712
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio. These plays display the author's appreciation of the essential properties of radio broadcasting. They also highlight a profound musicality which, while evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly noteworthy in this medium. This book is an analysis of the contribution made to radio drama by Beckett. In these plays, he is concerned with themes of human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication. He identified radio as an ideal medium for the presentation of these themes and the development of drama which could transcend the limitations of realism. Beckett used music as an essential component of his radio output for a variety of purposes. In this study, the author argues that, while Beckett's radio plays are suffused with a bleak sense of disintegration of language, music offers a sense of optimism. A variety of musical and performance perspectives is utilised to gain a greater appreciation of these radio plays.

Author: Mary Ketsin
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781590335901
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
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.

Author: Marjorie Howes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107494176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense. First-time readers of Yeats as well as more advanced scholars will welcome this comprehensive account of Yeats's career with its useful chronological outline and survey of the most important trends in Yeats scholarship. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential introduction for students and teachers of Yeats.

Author: Harry White
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191563161
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janácek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatisation of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

Author: Christopher Murray
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815606437
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This work provides an overview of Irish theatre, read in the light of Ireland's self-definition. Mediating between history and its relations with politics and art, it attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.

Author: Corey Wakeling
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350153133
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Offering fresh studies of Samuel Beckett in pre-production, in rehearsal, as an innovator of the script form, and as a speculative director and designer, Beckett's Laboratory reconsiders Beckett's stringent approach to stage direction through the lens of the laboratory and reveals his experimentalism with stage representation and composition. Wakeling argues that acknowledging Beckett's experimental processes, from their composition to their reception, is crucial to understanding the innovative representations of humanity that emerged at different stages in Beckett's practice. Repositioning Beckett's performance oeuvre in relation to philosophy, Wakeling draws upon post-dramatic, symbolist, materialist and post-structural understandings of theatre performance to reappraise Beckett's plays as a composition for performance. The philosophical underpinnings of Beckett's practices are explored through an eclectic mix of familiar and unexplored contemporary theatre productions and films of Beckett's works, including Not I, Nacht und Träume, Happy Days, Footfalls and Catastrophe. Beckett's Laboratory is a provocative examination of Beckett's experimentalism with the human spectacle and his playful reliance upon the interpretative powers of the actors and audience.