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Though widely lauded as one of the most creative and challenging forces in Irish theatre Frank McGuinness’s plays have often met with a tempestuous reception. This new work details the significance of key productions of his plays in the context of Ireland’s culture and society. Charting McGuinness’s development as a dramatist from The Factory Girls through to Gates of Gold it combines cultural, political and theatrical analysis to position McGuinness as the most significant Irish playwright of his generation. Textual analysis supports considerations of theatrical performance to show how visual art, stagecraft, sculpture and song are central to our understanding of McGuinness’s theatre. Drawing forth the range of sexual, familial and national identities found in McGuinness’s work this book shows the significance of symbols in theatre that often seeks to confuse the simplicities of absolutes in order to show the complexities of difference. Wide-ranging, theoretically astute and written in a lucid and engaging style, Celebrating Confusion will appeal to all readers who are interested in Irish Theatre and its intersection with the politics and culture of contemporary Ireland.
Generations of Irish playwrights have tried to assert the reputation of the stage Irish figure as other than comic, but each effort was in its turn assailed as buffoonery. Using post-colonial and performative theory, Buffoonery in Irish Drama demonstrates the ways the Irish struggled to create a sense of identity in a colonial structure, and it explores the distortion and appropriation of that new identity that elicit further calls to eradicate negative stereotypes. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the reclamation efforts, Buffoonery in Irish Drama covers a wide range of well-known and obscure plays to show the trajectory of twentieth-century drama that brings us into a globalized twenty-first-century Ireland.
Life is messy. Coping with cancer, step-parenting, rape, death, and infidelity, Kathy Heininge has been able to use the Rosary to help find a way through. Here, she ties the stories of her life to the mysteries of the Rosary, illuminating the way prayer can help us find a way through both the hard and the joyous times of our lives, but without giving pat or pious answers to life's questions.
Other Renaissances is a collection of twelve essays discussing renaissances outside the Italian and Italian prompted European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The collection proposes an approach to reframing the Renaissance in which the European Renaissance becomes an imaginative idea, rather than a particular moment in time
Religion, Secularism, and the Spiritual Paths of Virginia Woolf offers an expansive interdisciplinary study of spirituality in Virginia Woolf's writing, drawing on theology, psychology, geography, history, gender and sexuality studies, and other critical fields. The essays in this collection interrogate conventional approaches to the spiritual, and to Woolf’s work, while contributing to a larger critical reappraisal of modernism, religion, and secularism. While Woolf’s atheism and her sharp criticism of religion have become critical commonplaces, her sometimes withering critique of religion conflicts with what might well be called a religious sensibility in her work. The essays collected here take up a challenge posed by Woolf herself: how to understand her persistent use of religious language, her representation of deeply mysterious human experiences, and her recurrent questions about life's meaning in light of her disparaging attitude toward religion. These essays argue that Woolf's writing reframes and reclaims the spiritual in alternate forms; she strives to find new language for those numinous experiences that remain after the death of God has been pronounced.
This indispensable reference work provides readers with the tools to reimagine world history through the lens of women's lived experiences. Learning how women changed the world will change the ways the world looks at the past. Women Who Changed the World: Their Lives, Challenges, and Accomplishments through History features 200 biographies of notable women and offers readers an opportunity to explore the global past from a gendered perspective. The women featured in this four-volume set cover the full sweep of history, from our ancestral forbearer "Lucy" to today's tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams. Every walk of life is represented in these pages, from powerful monarchs and politicia...
This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a ‘verbal theatre’ has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness. okokpoj
The first edited collection of essays about internationally renowned Irish playwright Frank McGuinness focuses on both performance and text. Interpreters come to diverse conclusions, creating a vigorous dialogue that enriches understanding and reflects a strong consensus about the value of McGuinness's complex work. REVIEWS ". . . a fascinating and diverse collection of reactions to the work of Frank McGuinness". Reviewed by : Patrick Mason ". . . Frank McGuinness's drama in its richness and variety calls out for what this collection of essays supplies: A multi-authored volume by both practitioners and academics.....thoughtful, stimulating collection". Reviewed by : Anthony Roche "The diversity of the playwright's work is well matched in the collection by the scale of the different approaches the authors of the essays and talks take...I recommend the book especially to those who McGuinness difficult, but all readers are likely to put it down enriched and with a reformed view of drama and theatre in general" Reviewed by : Maria Kurdi, Drama League Magazine of Ireland, Spring 2004
This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are trea...
This volume explores the cultural, literary, theatrical, and political changes in Irish society from 1980. The so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ brought about cultural and economic rejuvenation in Ireland but this new found confidence and prosperity was destabilised by other events, such as the scandals in the Catholic Church, bringing into question the role of traditional institutions in contemporary Irish life. The ending of the Troubles and signing of the Good Friday Agreement similarly heralded a new era in terms of positive political change, but recent paramilitary activity threatens to undermine the progress made in the 1990s, as waves of new violence hit the North. Equally, recent economic...