No description available.

No description available.

This thesis provides a radical re-reading of a'Casey's early work, which sheds new light upon the later plays. The orthodox reading of the socalled 'Dublin Plays' - The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926) - as a triumph in theatrical naturalism that is never matched in the later plays, is here strongly countered. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that far from being dramatic failures, the later plays are fresh and dynamic, a logical and natural progression from the formal and thematic experiments within the early plays. The thesis argues that it is the critical labelling of a'Casey's first plays as 'comedies' or 'realist dramas', which has led to the prevailing view of the last plays as theatrically flawed. This distorting critical prism has resulted in an underplaying of a'Casey's significant contribution to theatrical innovation in the first half of the twentieth century. a'Casey's work has received comparatively little recent critical attention, particularly from British academics. This is clearly no academic accident: a'Casey's marginalisation by scholars is directly linked to the way theatre critics misinterpreted his plays from 1924 onwards, when they received their first performances at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. This study considers the complex dynamics of national and theatre politics that underpin these critical misunderstandings and explores why a'Casey has often been dismissed as a dramatist of character. Discussing plays from The Harvest Festival to The Moon Shines on Kylenamoe, I explore why each play becomes more experimental in form and analyse why a'Casey's critics and public alike gradually become alienated from what they perceive as the new experimental style of his later work. Chapter 1 considers a'Casey's early plays with special reference to the use of space in The Shadow of Gunman. In chapter 2 I examine the use of repetition as a controlling dramatic technique in Juno and the Paycock, chapter 3 explores the re-writing of history as drama through a'Casey's re-dramatisation the Easter Rising in The Plough and the Stars, chapter 4 focuses on a'Casey's engagement with European, especially German, Expressionism in The Silver Tassie; and his experimentation with what we now label 'Absurdist' techniques, as well as dance and song in Within the Gates which provides the subject for chapter 5. The later plays are discussed in chapter 6, where their formal and thematic innovations are considered in relation to the contemporary developments in the cinema and Absurdist drama.

This thesis undertakes a study of esotericism in the writings of Eva-Gore-Booth in order to generate insights into the approach to gender refracted in her literary output and illuminate the way in which recourse to esoteric, religious and philosophical traditions enabled her to negotiate the issue of sexual difference in a way that challenged its mainstream conceptualizations. The progression of proto-ecological concerns in Gore-Booth's literary and theological writing, and the ways in which such concerns are interwoven with her feminist advocacy of movement beyond male-female categorisation, are also examined . Through consideration of Gore-Booth's ekphrastic texts, the thesis explores Gore-Booth's philosophy of art, elucidating the esoteric underpinnings of her concept of art's origin and function. Her engagement with, and anxieties about, the issue of didactic ism and the political in art are also examined. The thesis also interrogates Gore-Baath's relationship to the Irish Literary Revival and evaluates the impact on her writing of the First World War and the Easter Rising of 1916, illuminating the accompanying shift toward Christian Mysticism and elucidating the contours of a spiritual feminism that produced ' ''the first major lrish feminist theological work": A Psychological and Poetic Approach to the Study of Christ in the fourth Gospel (1923). Through the application of interdisciplinary frameworks, this thesis aims to encourage scholarly interest in the writings of Gore-Booth across a range of disciplines by suggesting the relevance of her work to those working in areas such as gender studies, ecocriticism, body studies, theology, visual studies and translation studies.

Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars has often been considered an unreadable and therefore an un-performable play script from the time when it was written and published in BLAST in 1914 as part of the Vorticist manifesto. The play was not performed until 1980 and there was just one subsequent staging in 1982. However, both of these performances were based on Lewis’s 1932 revision. Although the play appeared as a piece of written text in BLAST, it was considered by the Vorticists as visual imagery. With this approach in mind, this research sets out to investigate the visualisation of the 1914 version of the play as a work of theatrical art from a practitioner’s viewpoint.