The Comic Irishman

Download or read book The Comic Irishman written by Maureen Waters and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Irishman makes heretofore unacknowledged distinctions among different types of comic Irishmen and convincingly casts away the stereotyped version of the stage Irishman. It shows how the Irish comic character--whether a blundering fool or a lazy, fun-loving fellow--evolved into a glib and witty rogue. The book is a critical study of modern Irish fiction and drama. The first part provides an analysis of the various Irish comic figures which were popular in the nineteenth century. These are discussed within a social and historic framework because they were to a large extent shaped by the erosion of Gaelic culture under the impact of English government. In the process of shifting from one cultural nexus to another, the Irishman came to be regarded as highly inferior to his English counterpart, yet amusing because of his difficulty with the English language and his rebellious, unpredictable behavior. The second part of the book discusses the writings of such twentieth-century authors as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Sean O'Casey, and Flann O'Brien, who concentrated on the analysis of the stage Irishman. Some brilliantly exploited the comic tradition, while other used satire to explode what they perceived as a debasing myth.

Download or read book The Comic Everywoman in Irish Popular Theatre written by Susanne Colleary and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-12-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive study of comic women in performance as Irish Political Melodrama from 1890 to 1925. It maps out the performance contexts of the period, such as Irish “poor” theatre both reflecting and complicating narratives of Irish Identity under British Rule. The study investigates the melodramatic aesthetic within these contexts and goes on to analyse a selection of the melodramas by the playwrights J.W. Whitbread and P.J. Bourke. In doing so, the analyses makes plain the comic structures and intent that work across both character and action, foregrounding comic women at the centre of the discussion. Finally, the book applies a “practice as research” dimension to the study. Working through a series of workshops, rehearsals and a final performance, Colleary investigates comic identity and female performance through a feminist revisionist lens. She ultimately argues that the formulation of the Comic Everywoman as staged “Comic” identity can connect beyond the theatre to her “Everyday” self. This book is intended for those interested in theatre histories, comic women and in popular performance.

Download or read book The Profane Book of Irish Comedy written by David Krause and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-30 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fierce mirth characterizes antic Irish comedy. To the degree to which everyone sympathizes with the need to mock repressive authority, everyone is potentially Irish. It is the Irish dramatists themselves, says David Krause, that are the true authors of the profane book of Irish comedy. The body of literature they have produced desecrates the sacred in Ireland and launches a sardonic attack on the queen of Irish nationalism, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the old sow who, according to Joyce's tragicomic jest, tries to devour her creative farrow. Krause discusses the major works of fourteen Irish playwrights—Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Dion Boucicault, William Boyle, Paul Vincent Carroll, George Fitzmaurice, Lady Gregory, Denis Johnston, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, Bernard Shaw, George Shields, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats—and shows the ways in which these works are linked, emotionally and thematically, to early Gaelic literature and the tradition of the mythic pagan playboy Oisin or Usheen. As the last great pagan hero of Ireland, Oisin emerges as an archetype for the many playboys and paycocks of Irish comedy. Oisin was the antithesis of St. Patrick, the first great Christian saint of Ireland, who, condemning pleasure and threatening eternal damnation, came to represent all authority. The bearers of this dark and wild Celtic tradition, which Synge and O'Casey associated with a daimonic or barbarous impulse, laugh irreverently at their own creations. This laughter, the laughter of the culture's mythmakers, brings with it emotional relief, comic catharsis.

Download or read book 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream written by W. H. A. Williams and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the Irish in the United States changed drastically over time, from that of hard-drinking, rioting Paddies to genial, patriotic working-class citizens. In 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream, William H. A. Williams traces the change in this image through more than 700 pieces of sheet music--popular songs from the stage and for the parlor--to show how Americans' opinions of Ireland and the Irish went practically from one extreme to the other. Because sheet music was a commercial item it had to be acceptable to the broadest possible song-buying public. "Negotiations" about their image involved Irish songwriters, performers, and pressured groups, on the one hand, and non-Irish writers, publishers, and audiences on the other. Williams ties the contents of song lyrics to the history of the Irish diaspora, suggesting how ethnic stereotypes are created and how they evolve within commercial popular culture.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama written by Shaun Richards and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-29 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction written by Michael L. Storey and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2004-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction offers a comprehensive examination of Irish short stories written over the last eighty years that have treated the Troubles, Ireland's intractable conflict that arose out of its relationship to England.

Download or read book The American Irish written by Kevin Kenny and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Irish: A History, is the first concise, general history of its subject in a generation. It provides a long-overdue synthesis of Irish-American history from the beginnings of emigration in the early eighteenth century to the present day. While most previous accounts of the subject have concentrated on the nineteenth century, and especially the period from the famine (1840s) to Irish independence (1920s), The American Irish: A History incorporates the Ulster Protestant emigration of the eighteenth century and is the first book to include extensive coverage of the twentieth century. Drawing on the most innovative scholarship from both sides of the Atlantic in the last generation, the book offers an extended analysis of the conditions in Ireland that led to mass migration and examines the Irish immigrant experience in the United States in terms of arrival and settlement, social mobility and assimilation, labor, race, gender, politics, and nationalism. It is ideal for courses on Irish history, Irish-American history, and the history of American immigration more generally.