Performing Character in Modern Irish Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction

   • Michał Lachman

   Pages 1-21

3. Social Man

   • Michał Lachman

   Pages 23-137

4. Linguistic Man

   • Michał Lachman

   Pages 139-228

5. Interactive Man

   • Michał Lachman

   Pages 229-303

6. Back Matter

   Pages 305-312

   PDF

This book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after.

The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.

• European Modernism
• Postmodernism
• Irish Theatre
• W. B. Yeats
• Post-war Drama
• Tom Murphy
• Enda Walsh
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Łódź, Łódź, Poland

  Michał Lachman

Michał Lachman is Lecturer in English and Irish Drama at the Department of Drama, University of Lodz, Poland. His research interests include the history of twentieth-century British and Irish drama, literary theory and translation. He has published on Brian Friel, Martin McDonagh, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Howard Barker, and translated Frank McGuinness’s and Christina Reid’s plays into Polish.

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