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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
In an examination of the prose and poetry of Irish women writers from the late eighteenth century through the present, contributors to this collection argue that a hidden tradition of women's comedy has evolved side by side with the canonical comic tradition. They call for a revisionist reading of Ireland's comic intellectual heritage - a reading from the perspectives of two genders - and demand a new kind of double optic - an interpretive frame of reference capable of grappling with difference. This collection will be of particular interest to Joyceans because it examines the influence of Joyce, who has been dismissed by many feminist critics as a pornographer and a champion of patriarchal privilege. It will also be of interest to students of African and African-American literature for its linking of Ireland's comic tradition to that of Africa's - a tradition noted for its use of ethical dialogue and for giving voice to the other.
A celebration of the tenacious life of the enduring Irish classics, this book by one of Irish writing's most eloquent readers offers a brilliant and accessible survey of the greatest works since 1600 in Gaelic and English, which together have shaped one of the world's most original literary cultures. In the course of his discussion of the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poems of dispossession, and of later work in that language that refuses to die, Declan Kiberd provides vivid and idiomatic translations that bring the Irish texts alive for the English-speaking reader. Extending from the Irish poets who confronted modernity as a cataclysm, and who responded by using traditional forms in novel and radical ways, to the great modern practitioners of such paradoxically conservative and revolutionary writing, Kiberd's work embraces three sorts of Irish classics: those of awesome beauty and internal rigor, such as works by the Gaelic bards, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, and Joyce; those that generate a myth so powerful as to obscure the individual writer and unleash an almost superhuman force, such as the Cuchulain story, the lament for Art O'Laoghaire, and even Dracula; and those whose power exerts a palpable influence on the course of human action, such as Swift's Drapier's Letters, the speeches of Edmund Burke, or the autobiography of Wolfe Tone. The book closes with a moving and daring coda on the Anglo-Irish agreement, claiming that the seeds of such a settlement were sown in the works of Irish literature. A delight to read throughout, Irish Classics is a fitting tribute to the works it reads so well and inspires us to read, and read again.
Talking to the Dead is an essay on death and its tenacious hold on Irish culture. There are few traditions in which funerary motifs have been so ubiquitous in literature, popular rituals, folk representations, public rhetorics, even constructions of place. There are even fewer cultures in which funerary genres and preoccupations constitute the central thread of continuity. The Irish Theatrum Mortis is not simply an obsession of writers from the bards to Beckett and Heaney. Nor is it confined to contemporary Republican iconography. It is to be found in the pages of the local press, in acts of ritual resistance to unpopular decisions, in the way in which significant public events are narrated and framed. Though the funerary Ireland presented here may well yield to the new, positive self-image of the Celtic Tiger, it is the authors' contention that at the end of the twentieth century the funerary sign continues to define Irish identity. For good and ill, it is the centre that holds.
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.
"Polhemus sketches several distinctions between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists and concludes that what most characterizes the nineteenth century, from the perspective of the twentieth, is the tendency in its comic fiction to criticize and to undermine the dogma and institutions of religion and to put faith instead of the existence of the comic perspective. Comic Faith is a virtuoso performance of impressive stature; I suspect the book will be influential for many years to come."—John Halperin, Modern Fiction Studies
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.
This popular introduction to the Irish language is now accompanied by an audio CD. Irish, also known as Irish Gaelic or Gaelige, is spoken today by approximately one million people worldwide. It is also the basis of the Irish literary tradition, which is the oldest in Europe after Greek and Latin. This valuable guide, ideal for both individual and classroom use, teaches the basics of Irish grammar and vocabulary in 10 easy-to-follow lessons. The audio CD feature complements the dialogue and grammar sections of the lesson, aiding the reader in understanding the language as spoken.