Brian Friel is Ireland's most important living playwright, and this book places him in the new canon of postcolonial writers. Drawing on the theory and techniques of the major postcolonial critics, F. C. McGrath offers fresh interpretations of Friel's texts and of his place in the tradition of linguistic idealism in Irish literature. This idealism has dominated Ireland's still incomplete emergence from its colonial past. It appeals to Irish writers like Friel who, following in a line from Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey, challenge British culture with antirealistic, antimirnetic devices to create alternative worlds, histories, and new identities to escape stereotypes imposed by the colonizers. Friel grew up in Northern Ireland's Catholic minority and now lives in the Irish Republic. McGrath maintains that all Friel's work is marked by colonial and postcolonial structures. Like his predecessor Wilde, Friel mixes lies, facts, memories, and individual perception to create new myths and elevates blarney to a realm of aesthetic and philosophical distinction. An important, accessible, scholarly introduction, this book illustrates how Friel playfully subverts the English language and transcends British influence. Friel's reality is constructed from personal fiction, and it is his liberating response to oppression.

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference. This edition includes papers from the 33rd annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include Bernard Shaw's use of gardens and libraries in Widowers' Houses, Northern Ireland emergency law in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City, cannibalism and surrogation in Hamletmachine, Sergei Eisenstein's and Charlie Chaplin's use of the "montage of attraction," and adaptations of classic Greek tragedy in Mexico and Taiwan, among other topics.

This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a ‘verbal theatre’ has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness. okokpoj

The action takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and rendered into English. In examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative.

Essays on Irish playwright, Brian Friel

Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strives to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.