Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007. / Title from screen (viewed on May 23, 2007) Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 82-83)

x, 147 p. A print copy of this title is available from the UO Libraries, under the call number: KNIGHT PR6053.A6944 Z75 2008 / This study explores and demonstrates how Marina Can uses Irish folktale motifs in her plays to bring the audience to a state of mind where they viscerally, as opposed to intellectually, engage with Ireland's search for a cultural post-colonial identity. The analysis of Carr's works focuses on four of her post- Mai plays: The Mai, Portia Coughlan, By the Bog of Cats, and On Raftery's Hill. The focus is on the connection between these plays and Irish folklore, and explores Carr's use of folklore motifs within her plays. The analysis uses the folkloristic research approach, which classifies items or stories in the folktales by identifying distinguishing characteristics or specific items within a tale genre. The indices used in the analysis are Aarne-Thompson Index, Tom-Peete Cross's Motif-index of Early Irish Literature, and Sean O'Sullivan's Motif-Index of Irish Folklore. The plays were searched for motifs that correspond with those of the folktale motifs, and were then compared with these found in the indices. A second analysis showed that, within these four plays, Marina Carr mainly uses Irish folktales from before England's colonization. She modifies the folktales within her plays, specifically around the issue of agency for her female protagonists. The concluding chapter offers a Jungian explanation of Carr's use of these folktales as a means to engage the Irish national discussion of the development of a cultural identity. / Adviser: John Watson

I argue that lyricism, prevalent on the Irish stage from the inception of the national dramatic theatre tradition, is invoked, subverted, and exhausted by contemporary Irish playwrights. Lyric art had an evident nation-building function on the Irish stage, but the capacities of lyric language also included the expression and containment of painful material that otherwise could not easily be represented or voiced, but which, by the second half of the twentieth century, could not be comfortably repressed. In the period 1960-2010 (from Tom Murphy to Mark O’Rowe), playwrights of national significance—Murphy, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh, Enda Walsh, and O’Rowe—increasingly associate the Hiberno-English lyric register with social fracture, emotional and psychic disturbance, and loss, until the lyric mode itself is exposed as inherently traumatized. I call this later mode, at the close of the twentieth century, “black lyric.” Black lyric operates as a travesty of lyric expression. Black lyrical writing is lyrical text containing, but also produced by, pain, and at its fullest power, it operates as a grotesque parody of poetic expressiveness. It confronts the audience with trauma and psychic suffering attached to national expression rather than offering sonorous comfort. This project uses a combination of close reading, historical research, and theoretical analysis to argue that the playwrights who deploy heightened Hibernicized English at the end of the twentieth century are commenting upon and challenging the canon of Irish drama, which depended on a lyric register not only to console but to conceal. Commentators of twentieth-century Irish drama routinely remark on the dramatic tradition’s visceral poetry, yet it is rarely the subject of any sustained analysis outside of considerations of “language” or “style” generally. This dissertation seeks to partly address that omission.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis centers on a country that has produced some of the greatest and most important English language dramas of the past two centuries. Within this cultural context, this thesis is also about a feminine revival in Irish theatre and how this can be a powerful tool to incite change. Early in history, Irish writers, and specifically dramatists, recreated a type of theatre that captured the true essence of what it meant to be Irish by representing their struggles, frustrations and humor. The Irish talent for storytelling connects back to its Gaelic roots and has remained a constant in the life of a culture that has passed down this art form for centuries. The focus of this thesis is to examine three contemporary Irish plays by prominent playwrights who came to the world of theatre from very different backgrounds. Each play is written by a different hand, yet all share a vital common denominator: the interaction of female character groups – groups that are central to the action of each play. What incited my interest in these three plays – Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone and Marina Carr’s The Mai – was the playwright’s ability to expose what had been silenced in Irish history for so long. Each female character portrays one important aspect of Irish womanhood that has been tragically understated in the nation’s literature since the death of John Millington Synge: woman’s struggle between what she wants to be and who she is expected to be. These three plays will be scrutinized in terms of three elements of social control contributing to woman’s struggle in Irish society: myth, church and patriarchal tradition.