Read Ireland Book Review
Issue 293
Cambridge University Press
Special Issue
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards
Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 290 pages
The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama fro the late nineteenth-century melodramas which anticipated the rise of the Abbey Theatre to the contemporary Dublin of theatre festivals. Further to studies of individual playwrights, the collection also includes an examination of the relationship between the theatre and its political context as this is inflected through its ideology, staging and programming. With a full chronology and bibliography, this collection is an indispensable introduction to one of the world’s most vibrant theatre cultures.
The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce 2ed edited by Derek Attridge
Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 290 pages [Add To Basket]
The second edition of this guide contains several new and revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce’s politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. An international team of leading scholars offers informative, stimulating essays full of rich and accessible insights which will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom.
A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 by Christopher Morash
Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 322 pages
This widely-praised account of Irish theatre traces an often forgotten history leading up to the Irish Literary Revival. The author then follows that history to the present by creating a remarkably clear picture of the cultural contexts which produced the playwrights who have been responsible for making Irish theatre’s world-wide historical and contemporary reputation. The main chapters are each followed by short chapters, focusing on a single night at the theatre. This prize-winning book is an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history and performance of Irish theatre.
Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’: A Student Guide by Lawrence Graver
Paperback; 16.50 Euro / 22.50 USD / 10.00 UK; 108 pages [Add To Basket]
This book offers a comprehensive critical study of Beckett’s most renowned dramatic work which has become one of the most frequently discussed and influential plays in the history of the theatre. The author discusses the play’s background and provides a detailed analysis of its originality and distinction as a landmark of modern theatrical art. He reviews some of the differences between Beckett’s original French version and his English translation, and discusses the liberating influence of the play on such important writers as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard.
Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Student Guide by Vincent Sherry
Paperback; 16.50 Euro / 22.50 USD / 10.00 UK; 108 pages
In this engaging introduction, the author combines a close reading of Joyce’s most famous novel with new critical arguments. Besides providing a useful guide to the episodic sequence of Joyce’s novel, the author freshly addresses the major issues in ‘Ulysses’ criticism. He shows how Joyce’s modernist epic remodels Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, and he examines and explains Joyce’s extraordinary verbal experiments, reading anew the most challenging language of the text. He also reclaims the landmark status of Joyce’s monumental novel, situating it in the relevant contexts of literary tradition and political history.
Images of Beckett by John Haynes and James Knowlson
Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 35.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 156 pages, with photos throughout [Add To Basket]
This book sets John Haynes’ unique repertoire of photographs of Beckett’s dramatic opus alongside three newly written essays by Beckett’s biographer and friend, James Knowlson. Haynes captures images of Beckett’s work in progress and performance and includes hitherto unseen portraits of Beckett himself. Haynes was privileged to be present at the Royal Court Theatre in London when Beckett directed his own plays. Among the 75 photographs are compositions that include the leading interpreters of the plays. Knowlson’s first essay combines a verbal portrait of Beckett with a personal memoir of the writer; the second considers the influence of paintings that Beckett loved or admired on his theatrical imagery; the third offers a detailed, often first-hand, account of Beckett’s work as a director of his own plays. The essays are the result of personal conversations with Beckett and attendance at rehearsals and they provide a unique glimpse into the world of one of the theatre’s most influential and enduring playwrights.
Beckett & Aestheitcs by Daniel Albright
Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 180 pages [Add To Basket]
This book examines Beckett’s struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. In this book the author argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement, and general failure. He arrived, the author shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. The author explores Beckett’s experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett’s own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic.
Edmund Burke and Ireland by Luke Gibbons
Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 300 pages [Add To Basket]
This pioneering study of Edmund Burke’s engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke’s influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke’s political imagination throughout his career. The author argues that this anxious aesthetics found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke’s preoccupation with violence, sympathy, and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation.
James Joyce and the Problems of Psychoanalysis by Luke Thurston
Hardback; 68.5.00 Euro / 80.00 USD / 45.00 UK; 232 pages [Add To Basket]
From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain, translating it as vagrant symptom or sublimated desire. Despite Joyce’s deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. In this book the author argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, the author shows that Jacques Lacan’s encounter with Joyce forms part of an effort to think beyond the ‘application’ of theory: instead of merely diagnosing Joyce’s writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. The author builds on Lacan’s notion of Joyce’s irreducible literary act to illuminate Joyce’s place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde.
Proust, Beckett and Narration by James H. Reid
Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 192 pages [Add To Basket]
This is the first book-length comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century’s most important prose writers. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu and Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, the author compares the two novelists’ use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. The author focuses on the narrator’s searches to represent and erase a voice that speaks the novel; searches, he argues, that structure first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust’s writing on Beckett’s own work as well as Beckett’s subtle reworkings of Proust’s theses and strategies.
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