ENGL 363, Topics in Twentieth-Century British Literature, Contemporary Irish Drama: Mirror Up To a Nation

Abstract

No nation in the English-speaking world has produced as many important dramatists, and as many influential plays, over the past century as Ireland. This course will survey Irish works for the stage between 1968 and 1998 against the backdrop of Ireland’s inward-looking, mid-century socio-cultural paralysis and its subsequent "Celtic Tiger" boom; the political “troubles” in Northern Ireland and other legacies of British colonialism; the island’s continuing challenges of poverty, emigration/depopulation, alcoholism, and equal rights/opportunities for women; and the contested role of various social institutions--church, school, family, pub, and theater--in Irish life. We will explore the ways in which a number of colorful, poignant, tragicomic Irish plays of the late-Twentieth Century engage in a dialogue with each other, with reigning theatrical conventions, and with key articulations of Irish national identity. Encounters with the plays will be supplemented with selected criticism and films. Cross-listed with Theatre 365.