Chosen and Introduced by Mary Shine Thompson

The fourteenth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.

Contains: The Son of Learning, The Flame, Black Fast, The Kiss, As the Crow Flies, The Viscount of Blarney, The Second Kiss, Liberty Lane,and the hitherto unpublished The Frenzy of Sweeney and St Patrick’s Purgatory (a translation of Calderón’s play), ‘Verse Speaking’, ‘Verse Speaking and Verse Drama’, and a bibliographical checklist.

Austin Clarke (1896-1974) is known as a poet, a playwright, a broadcaster and a novelist. In the later part of his life his work became better known principally through the support given by Liam Miller and the Dolmen Press in publishing his Collected Plays (1963) and later single plays, and volumes of poems, culminating in his Collected Poems (1974). His work as a reviewer was ceaseless, and during his life he wrote over 1,500 reviews, assessing over 5,000 books, but it must be as one of twentieth century Ireland’s most important poets that he is best known.

Clarke’s plays are less well known, both perhaps because they are verse plays, and also because they have been out of print for so many years, so the publication of a selection was long overdue.

Mary Shine Thompson is a lecturer in the English Department of St Patrick's College Drumcondra (Dublin City University) and College Coordinator of Research. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled 'Austin Clarke; A Literary Life-Chronology'. She was commissioned to prepare the National Library of Ireland's Catalogue of its Austin Clarke holdings, completed in 2003. Among her publications are Studies in Children Literature 1500-2000  (Four Courts Press, 2004) and Treasure Islands, Real And Imagined, in Children's Literature (2005), both edited with C. Keenan.

Please note. Due to changes in sale patterns since the series was started we have not issued this work in paperback. ISBN 0-86140-209-X is cancelled.

 

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Edited by Gregory A. Schirmer

21.6 x 13.8 cm.      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 40

Austin Clarke is widely regarded as one of 20th-century Ireland's most important poets. In this selection of nearly fifty essays and reviews written over Clarke's long career, he demonstrates that he is an astute and provocative literary critic as well.

Having grown up in Dublin when the excitement of the Irish Literary Revival was still running high, Clarke knew many of the principal figures of that movement personally, and his readings of Yeats, Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and others, enjoy the advantages of an insider's point of view. Moreover, committed in his own poetry to the basic assumption that fuelled the Literary Revival – that the most productive course for Irish  literature lay in the direction not of England but of Ireland – Clarke in his criticism provides a way of understanding, and judging, the Revival's major writers in terms of their relationships to Ireland's rich literary and cultural traditions. At the same time, these essays call attention to a number of distinctly Irish, but often overlooked, writers working on the margins of the revival.

As Yeats observed more than once, the Irish, for all the contributions that they have made to modern fiction, poetry, and drama, have fallen somewhat short in the genre of literary criticism. Austin Clarke's essays and reviews, many of which were written under a pseudonym and so not attributed to Clarke for years, go a long way towards filling that gap.

A selection of Clarke's writings on Yeats is followed by one on other Irish writers and the Irish Literary Revival, and on Modern English and American literature. Included as an appendix is an exhaustive list of Clarke's literary criticism, mostly in periodicals, including over 400 anonymous reviews written for the Times Literary Supplement.

 
Gregory A.Schirmer is the author of The Poetry of Austin Clarke and William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction, and has written widely on a variety of other modern Irish writers. He is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm     x, 277 pp.   1991      Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 34

Though men dominated early Irish society, women dominated the supernatural. Goddesses of war, fertility, and sovereignty ordered human destiny. Christian monks, in recording the old stories, turned these pagan deities into saints, like St Brigit, or into mortal queens like Medb of Connacht. The Morrigan, the Great Queen, war goddess, remains a figure of awe, but her pagan functions are glossed over. She perches, crow of battle, on the dying warrior CuChulainn’s pillar stone, but her role as his tutelary deity, and as planner and fomentor of the whole tremendous Tain, the war between Ulster and Connacht, is obscured. Unlike the Anglo-Irish authors who in modem times treated the same material in English, the good Irish monks were not shocked by her sexual aggressiveness. They show her coupling with the Dagda, the ‘good god’ of the Tuatha De Danann before the second battle of Mag Tuired, but they conceal that this act – by a goddess of war, fertility and sovereignty – gives the Dagda’s people victory and the possession of Ireland. Or they reduce the sovereignty to allegory – when Niall of the Nine Hostages sleeps with the Hag she is allegorical of the trials of kingship!

With the English invasion and colonisation, the power of the goddesses diminishes further. The Sovereignty has no kingship to bestow. In the aisling poets she becomes unattainable sexually, a vision of Irish independence. She no longer legitimises the king, but dreams of a Jacobite rescue. Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan combines this inaccessible vision-woman with the hag, the Poor Old Woman. She offers only death for a dream, though she has the walk of a queen. The Great Queens juxtaposes early Irish texts – such as Tain Bo Reganina, Togail Bruidne Da Derga, and many others – with Anglo-Irish treatments of the same themes by Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory, James Stephens, and W. B. Yeats. The book shows the fall in status of the pagan goddesses, first under medieval Christianity and then under Anglo-Irish culture. That this fall shows a loss in the recognition of the roles of women seems evident from the texts. This human loss only begins to be restored when, presiding over the severed heads in Yeats’s The Death of Cuchulain, the Morrigu declares, ‘I arranged the Dance.’

 

 

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23.3 x 15. 8 cm.    xxiv, 283 pp.    with over 50 illustrations

A critical work about one of the leading figures in modern poetry, this book shows how Yeats perfected great songs – “Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment”, “Three Things”, “After Long Silence”, “Her Triumph” – and great choruses – “Colonus’ Praise”, “From ‘Œdipus at Colonus’” and “From the ‘Antigone’”. The author follows the manuscript development of each poem to discover its full context in life and culture, to illuminate obscurities in the finished text, or simply to witness in amazement the emergence of a true poem from a tangle of abstractions. As a result, the reader is given original and interesting interpretations of the songs and choruses as final works of art.

“When I prepared ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ . . . wrote Yeats, “I saw that the wood of the Furies . . . was any Irish haunted wood.” Clark shows that Yeats re­membered Greece when he wrote songs for Crazy Jane. Greek myth appears in the songs, and Greek choruses appear in the “Irish” song cycles. The last word in “A Man Young and Old” is spoken of Œdipus and the last word in “A Woman Young and Old” of Antigone. Classical figures rub elbows with Huddon and Duddon and Daniel O’Leary. In “Her Triumph” the woman sees herself and her lover as Perseus and Andromeda.

Paintings, often of mythological subjects, were part of the context for Yeats’s poems. Yeats was an art student and the son and brother of well-known painters. The manuscripts show exactly what paintings – by Bellini, Carpaccio, Titian – were in Yeats’s thought when he wrote “Her Triumph” and Clark concludes that one of Burne-Jones’s Perseus series was the chief model for the poem’s imagery. Other poems, too, were written in the context of Yeats’s knowledge of art. Relevant illus­trations are included. Manu­scripts too are photographically reproduced.

Among the many comments on Clark’s skill as an interpreter of Yeats are: “Clark varies his approach to fit the materials at hand: with one poem he will emphasize the visual sources, for example, whereas with another lyric he will concern himself with biographical matters . . . Clark’s scholarship is quite sound, and he is working at the frontiers of Yeats scholarship.” – Richard J. Finneran, editor, Anglo-Irish Literature, A Review of Research

“Clark’s intricate analysis of Yeats’s ‘After Long Silence’ is a jewel of scholarship, moving and illuminating: in his analysis of the poem, and of the manuscripts out of which it emerged, Clark seems to have moved for a moment into Yeats’s mind.” - Robert O’Driscoll, The University of Toronto Quarterly.

'A pleasure to read....a book for anyone interested in Yeats or the creative process, a real contribution to Yeats studies.' Books Ireland'A pleasure to read....a book for anyone interested in Yeats or the creative process, a real contribution to Yeats studies.' Books Ireland

Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, David Clark was the author of Lyric Resonance: Glosses on Some Poems by Yeats, Frost, Crane, Cummings and Others and of Dry Tree: Poems. He has also either edited or co­edited a number of works on modern literature and on Irish culture.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.    271 pp.    1978       Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 3

George Moore once complained, after warmly appreciative reviews of a novel, 'So few bother to analyse the book carefully. It would have been very easy to discuss the form, compare my treatment of it with others' treatment of similar themes and so on, yet apparently no one has ever thought of that.' This rueful remark was the starting point in Richard Cave's design of this study. He has examined each of Moore's novels in detail and viewed them within the pattern of his total development and in the context of Moore's current reading and ideas about technique, as well as assessing the value of a wide range of influences to him. Professor Cave's study is basically divided into three parts: 'The Novel of Social Realism', which deals with A Modern Lover, A Mummer's Wife, A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters;  'A Phase of Experiment' deals with new influences and the resultant problems, the four novellas, Wagner's influence, Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa; and 'Styles for Consciousness' – The Lake, The Brook Kerith and the late historical novels, followed by a conclusion.

Author's Note<br

Introduction
<br

Part One: THE NOVEL OF SOCIAL REALISM<br

1. A Modern Lover<br

2. A Mummer's Wife<br

3. A Drama in Muslin<br

4. Esther Waters

Part Two: A PHASE OF EXPERIMENT<br

5. New Influences – New Problems<br

6. Four Novellas<br

7. Wagner and the Novel<br

8. Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa

Part Three: STYLES FOR CONSCIOUSNESS<br

9. The Lake – The Wagnerian Novel Perfected<br

10. The Brook Kerith and the Late Historical Novels<br

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Richard Allen Cave, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway in the University of London, has published extensively in the fields of renaissance drama (Jonson, Webster, Brome), modern English and Irish theatre (Wilde, Yeats, Pinter, Beckett, Friel, Mc Guinness), dance (Ninette de Valois, Robert Helpmann), stage design (Charles Ricketts, Robert Gregory) and direction (Terence Gray). Most recently, he devised and was General Editor of an AHRC-funded project to create an online edition of The Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010), and published the monograph, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011). The Collected Brome is soon to be published in a more traditional book-format by Oxford University Press (2020). He has also edited the plays of Wilde, Yeats and T.C. Murray; and the manuscript versions of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March. Professor Cave is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner who works on vocal techniques with professional actors and on extending movement skills with performers in physical theatre.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm  

This symposium was first delivered as a series of lectures in Rome arranged under the auspices of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and the British Council. The aim was very much to interpret the drama created by the English Romantic poets from the perspective of the modern theatrical tradition.

The four essays included here investigate the relationship between the Romantics and the theatre of their own time, assess the considerable body of dramatic works com­posed by Byron and Shelley, and explore the history of plays by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Byron in performance on the British stage.

All argue that, though the Romantic poets were out of sympathy with the theatre of their day, they wrote forms of drama that to a considerable degree anticipate the theatre of the present century.

As Sir Joseph Cheyne states in his Foreword to this volume: ‘No one realised, when the symposium was planned, what a remarkable impact it would have. The accepted idea of the Romantic theatre was still one of lyric drama, difficult to produce and perform. To hear it described suddenly as modern, psychological drama, as the theatre of the mind, the “theatre of violence”, was so striking that the ripples are still washing the shore’.

This symposium comprises ‘The Romantic Poet and the Stage: A Short, Sad History’ (Professor Timothy Webb), ‘The Dramas of Byron’ (Professor Giorgio Melchiori), ‘The Shelleyan Drama’ (Professor Stuart Curran), ‘Romantic Drama in Performance’ (Dr. Richard Allen Cave), and a select biblio­graphy on the Romantic Drama (Christina Gee and Judith Knight).

Richard Allen Cave, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway in the University of London, has published extensively in the fields of renaissance drama (Jonson, Webster, Brome), modern English and Irish theatre (Wilde, Yeats, Pinter, Beckett, Friel, Mc Guinness), dance (Ninette de Valois, Robert Helpmann), stage design (Charles Ricketts, Robert Gregory) and direction (Terence Gray). Most recently, he devised and was General Editor of an AHRC-funded project to create an online edition of The Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010), and published the monograph, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011). The Collected Brome is soon to be published in a more traditional book-format by Oxford University Press (2020). He has also edited the plays of Wilde, Yeats and T.C. Murray; and the manuscript versions of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March. Professor Cave is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner who works on vocal techniques with professional actors and on extending movement skills with performers in physical theatre.

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-321-9
21.6 x 13.8 cm         revised edition of the 1988 hbk

The works of established dramatists and of new talents are examined from the stand-point of the original production and initial casts, the major dramatists studied being Alan Ayckbourn, Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Trevor Griffiths, David Hare, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and David Storey. A central theme of the book is the current relationship between the author and the actor.

CONTENTS
Harold Pinter
New Forms of Comedy: Ayckbourn and Stoppard
Monologues and Soliloquies: Samuel Beckett
Poetic Naturalism: David Storey
Political Drama and David Hare
Trevor Griffiths
The History Play: Edward Bond

'As drama in performance is now, rightly, given such prominence in the study of playwrights and plays there is obvious need for an intelligent and sensitive book which looks at recent drama in the context of the stage. This is exactly what Richard Cave presents in his latest work. . . . this is a book which future historians will be grateful for, and which ordinary readers can dip into for the pleasure of reliving, or vicariously experiencing for the first time, the peculiar excitement of seeing new plays that constitute a new theatrical event.'  R.P.Draper in Times Higher Education Supplement

Richard Allen Cave, Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway in the University of London, has published extensively in the fields of renaissance drama (Jonson, Webster, Brome), modern English and Irish theatre (Wilde, Yeats, Pinter, Beckett, Friel, Mc Guinness), dance (Ninette de Valois, Robert Helpmann), stage design (Charles Ricketts, Robert Gregory) and direction (Terence Gray). Most recently, he devised and was General Editor of an AHRC-funded project to create an online edition of The Collected Plays of Richard Brome (2010), and published the monograph, Collaborations: Ninette de Valois and William Butler Yeats (2011). The Collected Brome is soon to be published in a more traditional book-format by Oxford University Press (2020). He has also edited the plays of Wilde, Yeats and T.C. Murray; and the manuscript versions of Yeats’s The King of the Great Clock Tower and A Full Moon in March. Professor Cave is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner who works on vocal techniques with professional actors and on extending movement skills with performers in physical theatre.

 

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-193-2

21.6 x 13.8 cm   255 pp.  1989

W.B.Yeats is one of the most important and widely-read poets of the twentieth century, occupying a central position in literature courses throughout the world. Yet he is often presented in critical works as a ‘difficult’ poet who can only be understood by reference to other writings that must be used as keys to unlock the mysteries of his work. It is the belief of the authors of this book that the poetry must be approached on its own terms, and its meanings established in as simple a way as possible before these texts can be enriched by knowledge of the biographical, historical, philosophical or aesthetic contexts.

This book is an essential companion to the poetry of Yeats for students in every country where his work is known. It sets out to meet the demands both of those whose first language is English, and of those for whom it is their second. Consequently the core of this volume is a detailed study of some ninety poems which cover all phases of Yeats’s poetic development. Each poem is provided with a summary, glossary and commentary, based on the primary meaning. The poems are also set in both the immediate context of the collections in which they were first published, and the wider context of the evolution of Yeats’s art and philosophy.

The Companion has a general commentary section dealing with Yeats’s style, his symbolism, his vision, the people and places that appear in his works, and the role of magic, myth, legend, history, civilization, nationalism and politics in the poems. There is also a useful list of recommended works, and basic texts.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm. xiv, 301 pp. 1982 Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 10

Published to mark the centenary of Joyce's birth, this collection has a foreword by Richard Ellmann, a message from Samuel Beckett, and essays by Bernard Benstock, Paul & Sylvia Botheroyd, Terence Brown, Suheil Bushrui, Paul van Caspel, Dominic Daniel, Phillip Herring, Declan Kiberd, Augustine Martin, Vivian Mercier, David Norris, John Paul Riquelme, Charles Rossmann, Ann Saddlemyer, Thomas F.Staley and Francis Warner, as well as poems by Suzanne Brown, Suheil Bushrui, John Montague and Gearóid Ó Clérigh, and a chronology. It covers every aspect of Joyce's work, with essays on each of the major works, on his poetry, and studies on various aspects of his life, the influence of Rimbaud, Joyce's connections with the Irish Dramatic Movement, and Joyce in Dublin, as well as essays on Joyce scholarship up to the date of publication.

'All in all, a rewarding compilation, rarely arid, and frequently vivacious.' Sunday Tribune

'an excellent book, one of the most provocative and rewarding in the current centenary-year cornucopia.' Books Ireland'

CONTENTS<br

A Message from Samuel Beckett<br

In Memoriam Sir Desmond Cochrane 1918-1979<br

Foreword: JOYCE AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS. Richard Ellmann<br

Acknowledgements<br

Introduction. Suheil Badi Bushrui and Bernard Benstock<br

JAMES JOYCE - NÓ SÉAMAS SEOIGHE. Gearóid Ó Clérigh<br

DUBLIN OF DUBLINERS. Terence Brown<br

THE READER'S ROLE IN A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. Charles Rossman<br

EXILES: A MORAL STATEMENT. Dominic Daniel<br

ON THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE IN ULYSSES. Bernard Benstock<br

JOHN EGLINTON AS SOCRATES: A STUDY OF `SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS'. Vivian Mercier<br

TWISTS OF THE TELLER'S TALE: FINNEGANS WAKE. John Paul Riquelme<br

THE POETRY OF JAMES JOYCE. FRANCIS WARNER<br

JAMES JOYCE. John Montague<br

A TURNIP FOR THE BOOKS: JAMES JOYCE, A CENTENARY TRIBUTE. David Norris<br

SIN AND SECRECY IN JOYCE'S FICTION. Augustine Martin<br

THE VULGARITY OF HEROICS: JOYCE'S ULYSSES. Declan Kiberd<br

NIGHT FOX: FOR JAMES JOYCE. Suzanne Brown<br

JOYCE AND RIMBAUD. AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. Phillip Herring<br

JAMES JOYCE AND THE IRISH DRAMATIC MOVEMENT. Ann Saddlemyer<br

THE WANDERS: FOR JAMES JOYCE. Suheil Bushrui<br

JOYCE STUDIES IN THE NETHERLANDS. Paul van Caspel<br

JOYCE IN GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND. Paul and Sylvia Botheroyd<br

JOYCE IN THE ARAB WORLD. Suheil Bushrui<br

FOLLOWING ARIADNE'S STRING: TRACING JOYCE SCHOLARSHIP<br

INTO THE EIGHTIES. Thomas F.Staley<br
CHRONOLOGY. Suheil Bushrui<br

Notes on Contributors<br

Index

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'Sunshine & the Moon's Delight'
ISBN: 978-0-900675-78-8

21.0 x 13.8 cm.      356 pp.      1979

A paperback edition of the out-of-print hardback Sunshine & the Moon's Delight

The essays in this book (first published in 1972) demonstrate the universal appeal of J. M. Synge’s writings and his influence in the world. Collected and published in commemoration of the centenary of his birth, the volume originates from the oldest ‘modern’ university in the Arab world, and the contributions come from many countries, including Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Syria and the United States.

The collection consists of essays dealing with specific works (drama, poetry and prose) as well as with general studies of Synge as man and artist.

The book brings together in one volume some of the different kinds of work being carried out in the field of Synge studies.

It has not only proved of value to scholars, but is also a most useful reference work for students at schools and universities. It is edited by Suheil Badi Bushrui, who was born in Jordan,and was at that time Chairman of the Department of English at the American University of Beirut and a Ph.D. of Southampton University (England), where he was a British Council Scholar. He taught at the University of Ibadan (Nigeria), Calgary and York (Canada), and lectured at African, American, English and continental universities. In 1963 he was awarded the Una Ellis-Fermor Prize for his work on W. B. Yeats, on whom he has published four books; Yeats’s Verse Plays; The Revisions, 1900-1910 (1965); W. B. Yeats; Centenary Essays (1965); Shi'un Min Yeats (1969), the first book in Arabic on Yeats; and Images and Memories; A Pictorial Record of the life and works of W. B. Yeats (1970).

He has also written on English, Arabic and African literatures as well as on Anglo-Irish literature, his main interest. He organised the Gibran International Festival in Beirut (1970), and edited An Introduction to Kahlil Gibran (1970) and several other works on Gibran and Ameen Rhiani.  He was President of the Association of University Teachers of English in the Arab World. He died on 10 September 2015. Obituaries can be found at http://ysnews.com/news/2015/09/suheil-badi-bushrui and at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bs-md-ob-suheil-bushrui-20150927-story.html, https://arabhyphen.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/suheil-badi-bushrui-passes-away-1929-2015/  and elsewhere.

 

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.   l, 455 pp.      2006   Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 53

The William Carleton Summer School is one of the most important literary festivals on the island in that there are very few that make a point of studying an aspect of Ireland before the Great Famine. William Carleton (1794-1869) is the greatest author to have written about the Irish peasant and the Ireland of the period immediately preceding it: he enables the reader to think back past the Famine into the culture – particularly the peasant culture – of that time, confused, rich, tortured, bilingual, that made him as a writer.

Enjoying immense popularity during his lifetime, his popularity dwindled but a century after his death it began to revive, not least because of the influence of the Summer School. The lectures given at the School and revised for publication in William Carleton, The Authentic Voice provide ample evidence that he was one of the greatest entertainers of Irish literature in English.

This volume also contains contemporary portraits of Carleton, reproduces previously unpublished letters and documents, a chronology, publication history of his writings, provides fine line illustrations by Sam Craig and detailed maps of the countryside he loved and wrote about, so this is an indispensable book for everyone interested in Carleton and pre-Famine Ireland.

Edited by Gordon Brand, the collection contains contributions by Gordon Brand, Terence Brown, Brian Earls, Peter Denman, Owen Dudley Edwards, Marianne Elliott, Thomas Flanagan, Roy Foster, Maurice Harmon, Seamus Heaney, Eamonn Hughes, Jack Johnston, John Kelly, Declan Kiberd, David Krause, Robin Marsh, John Montague, Pat John Rafferty, Sean Skeffington, Barry Sloan, Norman Vance, and Robert Welch.

 

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ISBN: 978-0-944318-05-8

Walter Pater (1839-1894) was one of the Transition Era's most influential figures. In this collection of essays, distinguished scholars continue research into his life. Subjects are included for the apprentice as well as the expert: from a scandal during Pater's Oxford days, to the influences upon him by Wordsworth and Arnold, and in turn to his influence upon Hopkins and Joyce. Contributors include: Billie A. Inman, Gerald Monsman, J.P. Ward, Lesley Higgins, F.C. McGrath, Paul Tucker, Richard Dellamora, Hayden Ward, J.B. Bullen, M.F. Moran, Bernard Richards, Anne Varty, Jane Spirit.

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Chosen and Introduced by Andrew Parkin

The fourth volume of the Irish Drama Selections series (ISSN 0260-7962), General Editors: Joseph Ronsley and Ann Saddlemyer.

21.6 x 13.8 cm.  416 pp. 2009     2nd, enlarged edition

Contains: London Assurance, The Corsican Brothers, The Octoroon, The Colleen Bawn, The Shaughraun, Robert Emmet, bibliographical checklist. plus  Boucicault's "'Canterin' Jack' - A Sketch from Life. How The Shaughraun was originated'.

Dion Boucicault was a prominent playwright and prolific adapter of foreign plays and novels.  He is known and loved especially for his high melodrama.  Extremely popular on the Victorian commercial theatre for over forty years, his plays today still provide enjoyment to all audiences Born in Dublin, he achieved his first West End success with London Assurance in 1841. His work frankly catered to contemporary taste and fell rapidly into neglect after his death in 1890, but his lively observation of humanity in many moods, and his unerring sense of what works on the stage, have led his plays in recent years to successful revivals in Dublin, Belfast, Chichester and London, perhaps the most notable being the National Theatre's production of The Shaughraun starring Stephen Rea in the title role.

The works chosen for this volume illuminate Boucicault's consummate craft as a writer for the theatre in the age of actor-managers and melodrama. They also remind us of that Irish verve, charm and adroitness which made him the most popular playwright of his generation  on both sides of the Atlantic. Arguably the father of both the Irish and American drama, his characteristic plotting and taste for sensation suggest that another of his heirs was the early movie industry.

This volume includes the great success of Boucicault's youth, London Assurance, together with his preface to the first edition; his durable version of the melodrama The Corsican Brothers; the exciting American plantation play The Octoroon, with both its endings; and three of his Irish plays, The Colleen Bawn, Robert Emmet, and The Shaughraun, to which has now been added his article on Cantherin' Jack, his inspiration for that play's title role. A selected bibliographical checklist, dates of first performances and cast lists are given, as are the songs, music and a glossary for the Irish plays.

The present selection from Boucicault's vast opus is chosen and introduced by Andrew Parkin. Andrew Parkin is Professor Emeritus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Honorary Senior Tutor of Shaw College. An Honorary Life Member of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies and Adviser to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, he belongs to a number of other international scholarly organisations. A member of the Canadian Writers’ Union, he is also adviser to the Canadian Chinese Writers’ Association. Residing now in France, he is President of the Paris Decorative and Fine Arts Society. He publishes scholarly books, mainly on drama, as well as original poetry, and short fiction.

 

 

 

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21.6 x 13.8 cm      xiv, 211 pp.  2009    Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392)  volume 15

The essays in this collection seek to refine our understanding of the often polyvalent and conflicted engagement that Irish dramatists have entered into with nationalism, a cultural and political movement that they have often attempted to simultaneously resist and renegotiate.

These nine essays construct a genealogy of dissent, of loyal opposition, revealing the apprehension and dissatisfaction with which the twentieth century’s most influential playwrights have sometimes viewed the Irish state, from its emergence in the early 1900s to its maturity at the century’s end. The articles on W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, and Sean O’Casey reveal the early Abbey Theatre’s struggle to critique the failures of and influence the development of the early state and its proscriptive brand of nationalist Irishness. The essays exploring the later plays of Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Anne Devlin, Christina Reid, Marie Jones, and Marina Carr expose both the conceptual and political failures of mainstream Irishness in the second half of the twentieth century to satisfy the material or political aspirations of people on either side of the Irish border. While many of this collection’s essays share a common postcolonial interpretive strategy, individual articles also employ the strategies of ecocriticism, social anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and nationalist theory. The fifteenth volume in the Ulster Editions and Monographs series

CONTENTS

Scott Boltwood. Introduction

Colonialism and the Free State:
Hyangsoon Yi. The Traveller in Irish Drama and the Works of J.M.Synge and Seamus O’Kelly
Barbara Suess. Individualism and the Acceptance of Other: Yeats and Where There is Nothing
Scott Boltwood. ‘I keep silence for good or evil’: Lady Gregory’s Cloon plays and Home Rule
Paul Cantor. O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and the Problematic Freedom of the Irish Free State

The Republic and the North
Paul Davies. Earthing the Void: Beckett, Bio-regionalism, and Eco-poetics
Shaun Richards. Brian Friel: Seizing the Moment of Flux – Ros Dixon. Chekhov Bogged Down? Tom Kilroy’s version of The Seagull
Susan Cannon Harris. Her Blood and Her Brother: Gender and Sacrifice in Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians
Rebecca Pelan. Two’s Company, Three’s a Community: Women’s Drama from Northern Ireland
Maria-Elena Doyle. ‘What Sort of Monsters Must We Have Been’: Irishness and the Gothic in McDonagh, Carr and McPherson

Notes – Bibliography – Contributors – Index

Front cover illustration. The Irish Academy of Letters' Gregory Medal, designed by Maurice Lambert (1901-1964) who called it 'Aengus and the Birds', although Yeats preferred the title 'Inspiration'. About seventeen copies were cast in bronze in 1934, and the mould destroyed.  As originator of the project, W. B. Yeats was given one copy by Lambert. Yeats later presented one to Patrick McCartan, the major contributor to its cost, one was bought by the Royal Mint, and fifteen were for presentation by the Academy. These were lodged in a box in the Bank of Ireland, College Green. The actual recipients of the Medal were W. B. Yeats, George W. Russell ('AE'), and Bernard Shaw (all of whom were awarded it in 1935), Douglas Hyde (1937), E. Å’. Somerville (1941), Eoin MacNeill (1944), Stephen Gwynn (1949), Padraic Colum (1953), Seumas O'Sullivan (1957), Micheál mac Liammóir(1960), Austin Clarke (1968), Mary Lavin (1974), Arland Ussher (1975), and John Hewitt (1984). Yeats's intention was that once the medals had all been used, the Academy would commission a new design for future presentations of the Medal. The Academy unanimously agreed on 11 July 1974 that Peadar O'Donnell and Mary Lavin should both be awarded the Medal, but there is no record that O'Donnell ever received it. It is possible that he refused the honour. After Sean J. White removed the medal for Hewitt from the Academy's box at the Bank in 1984, he noted that only one remained. The Academy's archives are now in the National Library of Ireland (MSS 33,745-33,746).

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ISBN: 978-0-86140-320-2

21.0 x 14.8 cm.      34pp.    1989    Princess Grace Irish Library Lectures series (ISSN 0269-2619) volume 6

James Joyce's world is filled with characters who have artistic ambitions or temperaments – or pretensions. The 'artist' is a central figure in that world – yet it is peopled with characters who, individually and collectively, present us with Joyce's 'poor trait of the artless', his portrait of the artist manqué.

In the first, encompassing essay in this volume Morris Beja argues that in all Joyce's work there may be only one or two genuinely fulfilled artists – and that we cannot be certain even about them. A major question is how we regard Stephen Dedalus in this light: for he seems to be an unfulfilled artist on Bloomsday, yet perhaps one with the promise of future accomplishment.

Stephen is examined here in the context of the many other artists manqué in Joyce's works: in Dubliners (notably Little Chandler, James Duffy, and Gabriel Conroy), Ulysses (Leopold Bloom, and Molly as well), and Finnegans Wake (Shem and Shaun, notoriously, but also ALP) – and numerous minor figures in all those works and others.

The second essay returns Beja (the author of Epiphany in the Modern Novel) to the concept of epiphany, with new perspectives informed by recent critical theory, as he explores the role of uncertainty – indeterminacy – in the world of James Joyce.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.     xvi, 131 pp.  + 16 pp illus.       1991
  Ulster Editions & Monographs series (ISSN 0954-3392)  volume 3

These essays comprise the first extensive re-appraisal of Charles Lever for over fifty years. Once regarded as the equal of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, Lever’s public turned their backs upon him when he changed style and genre after making his name with comic military tales. He never recaptured his early popularity, but his later novels in fact manifest a much more serious and crafted approach to fiction, and richly deserve revival.

Lever’s own turbulent and often unhappy life of social and cultural exile in Europe provides the hidden theme of many of his better novels. Continental and Irish settings and preoccupations are juxtaposed, making his contribution to the Anglo-Irish novel per se an unusual and challenging one.

Lever is a shrewd observer of character – particularly of female character; few of his better-remembered contemporaries write with more insight about women; old, young, rich, poor; loving, hating, dominating, subjected. His eye for place is acute; Scott is his model, but Lever’s ability to correlate character with environment is finely developed. His political observations, always well-integrated into the fabric of his plot, are shrewd and balanced.

The current neglect of this accomplished and cosmopolitan Irishman is entirely unwarranted. Though he wrote too much, too hastily, and under pressures sometimes too much dominated by the intransigent necessities of serial publication, the contri­butors to this volume seek to show that Lever deserves a re-appraisal, and a revival of attention to his extensive and often original output. Thus, hopefully, the revival of interest in Charles Lever, commencing with this volume, should attract readers of the novel well beyond the specialist range of Anglo-Irish scholars.

Contents
Introduction: 'The Famous Irish Lever'. Tony Bareham
'Reading Lever'. A. Norman Jeffares
'A Tale of Love and War: Charles O'Malley'. Lorna Reynolds
'Dr Lever at Portstewart'. Bill Rodgers
'Transitional States in Lever'. Richard Haslam
'Lever's Post-Famine Landscape'. Chris Morash
'Charles Lever and the Outsider'. Tony Bareham
Notes
Index
 

 

 

 

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21.6 x 13.8 cm.    xvi, 241 pp.  + 4pp. illus       1990     Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X)  volume 32

Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats, fills a long-felt gap in a neglected area of Yeats studies. It begins with an account of Yeats’s knowledge of the Classics, and then deals with the topics of Philosophy, mainly Platonism; a full, new reading of ‘Under Ben Bulben’; Greek myth, used to validate both personal experience – Maud Gonne as Helen – and a cyclical theory of history; Literature, the two Oedipus plays; Visual art, including an elaborate reading of 'The Statues’, and ‘Byzantium’, the famous passage in A Vision, and the two great poems, in their historical context.

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21.6 x 138. cm.      x, 193 pp.  1989 
Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 29

Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Litera­ture contains a selection of the papers given at the fifth triennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature held in Belfast in 1985, chaired by Professor John Cronin. It includes essays on Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, J. S. Le Fanu, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats, as well as papers on more general themes, such as the critical condition of Ulster, English political writers on Ireland, national character and national audience, autobiographical im­agination and Irish literary autobiog­raphies. The contributors to this volume, the twenty-ninth in the Irish Literary Studies Series, are Catherine Belsey, Patricia Coughlan, Seamus Deane, Gerald FitzGibbon, Ruth Fleischmann, Margaret Fogarty, John Wilson Foster, Eamonn Hughes, Michael Kenneally, Tom Paulin, Walter T. Rix, and Nicholas Roe. The editors are Michael Allen and Angela Wilcox.

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21.6 x 13.8 cm    350 pp.    1987
Irish Literary Studies series (ISSN 0140-895X) volume 27

W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu is a study of the Irish fairy faith in its ancient and traditional forms, and of Yeats’s response to that faith.

The first part concerns the ancient beliefs, chiefly as they are expressed in mythology, and describes the origins and characteristics of the Tuatha De Danann. Peter Alderson Smith shows how they are a folk memory of an ancient people who have to some degree acquired divine and ghostly characteristics.

Part two describes the fairies of modern folklore, the various types, their charac­teristics, and differences from ghosts, in being a separate and supernatural race of people, homogeneous but unpredictable and notorious for their capriciousness.

Part three finds in Yeats's work between the writing of The Countess Cathleen (1891-92) and the poems of Responsibilities (1914) a desire to know more about the Otherworld that resulted in a relationship that fluctuated between the poles of frustration and despair on the one hand, and morbid enthusiasm on the other. That the process was ultimately therapeutic is shown by Yeats’s move away from the Celtic Twilight to the poems of his maturity.

 

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This collection is the second volume in the IASAIL-JAPAN series, which was set up by the Japanese branch of the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature.

Many major Irish authors have been dramatists as well as poets and novelists, and perhaps the most famous have gained their fame because of their dramatic output. Over the past three centuries many of the dramatists whose names are remembered have Irish connections - Farquhar, Steele, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Boucicault, Wilde, Synge, Shaw, Yeats, O'Casey, Behan, Beckett, Friel, and Leonard come to mind.

The essays in this collection deal primarily with dramatists of this century, particularly Shaw, Yeats, O'Casey, Behan, Robinson, Beckett and Stewart Parker, but there are more wide-ranging essays – on contemporary fashions in Irish theatre, on O’Casey's influence on modern drama, on the humour of deprivation, and on dramatisations of the life of Jonathan Swift.

The contributors are Eugene Benson, Richard Allen Cave, Emelie Fitzgibbon, Nicholas Grene, Heinz Kosok, Desmond Maxwell, Vivian Mercier, Christopher Murray, Andrew Parkin, Masaru Sekine, James Simmons, Sumiko Sugiyama, Robert Welch and Katherine Worth.

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