Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature

by Nicholas Taylor-Collins (Editor), Stanley van der Ziel (Editor)

Overview

This book shows that Shakespeare continues to influence contemporary Irish literature, through postcolonial, dramaturgical, epistemological and narratological means. International critics examine a range of contemporary writers including Eavan Boland, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, Frank McGuinness, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon, and explore Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories and comedies, as well as his sonnets. Together, the chapters demonstrate that Shakespeare continues to exert a pressure on Irish writing into the twenty-first century, sometimes because of and sometimes in spite of the fact that his writing is inextricably tied to the Elizabethan and Jacobean colonization of Ireland. Contemporary Irish writers appropriate, adopt, adapt and strategize through their engagements with Shakespeare, and indeed through his own engagement with the world around him four hundred years ago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030071165
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	12/28/2018
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2018
Pages:	258
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Taylor-Collins is Lecturer in English Literature at Swansea University, UK, where he teaches on early modern, twentieth- and twenty-first literature. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick, having also studied at The University of Manchester. His research focuses widely both on early modern English literature, and modern and contemporary Irish literature, with publications on Shakespeare, James Joyce and John McGahern.

Stanley van der Ziel is Lecturer in English at Maynooth University, Ireland, where he teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century British and Irish literature. His publications include numerous articles on Irish authors, from Yeats to Joseph O’Neill. He is the author of John McGahern and the Imagination of Tradition (2016), and the editor of two editions of McGahern’s works: Love of the World: Essays (2009) and The Rockingham Shoot and Other Dramatic Writings (2018).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Shakespeare, Ireland and the Contemporary; Nicholas Taylor-Collins and Stanley van der Ziel.- 2. ‘memory like mitigation’: Heaney, Shakespeare and Ireland; Rui Carvalho Homem.- 3. ‘an inconstant stay’: Paul Muldoon, Seamus Heaney and the Ends of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; Tom Walker.- 4. Moving the Statue: Myths of Motherhood in Eavan Boland, Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture; Nicholas Taylor-Collins.- 5. ‘This rough magic’: Late Derek Mahon and Late Shakespeare; Sarah Bennett.- 6. What Ish My language? The Politics of Translation in Brian Friel’s Translations and Shakespeare’s Henry Plays; Anthony Roche.- 7. Conjuring Ghosts: Shakespeare, Dramaturgy and the Plays of Frank McGuinness; Anne Fogarty.- 8. ‘Filial ingratitude’: Marina Carr’s Bond with Shakespeare; Willy Maley and Stanley van der Ziel.- 9. McGahern’s Lear, or: Tragedy in the Barracks; Stanley van der Ziel.- 10. Performing Prospero: Intertextual Strategies in John Banville’s Ghosts; Elke D’hoker.