Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949 [Hardcover]

Hegemony and Fantasy in Irish Drama, 1899-1949 offers a theoretically innovative reconsideration of drama produced in the Irish Renaissance, as well as an engagement with non-canonical drama in the under-researched period 1926-1949.Introduction? PART I: PEASANT QUALITY AND THE NATIONAL QUINTESSENCE Dream of the Noble and the Beggarman To Live the Things That I Before Imagined Whatever Rule We May Have, We'll Always Have Our Tramps and Paupers That Ireland Which We Dreamed Of PART II: THE WOMAN?AND ITS VICISSITUDES?? What Kind of a Living Woman is it That You Are At All? That a Black Twisty Divil Could Be Hiding Under Such Comeliness Sure if I Was a Good Wife to Him  That Mightn't Be An Easy Job! Woman Gives to the State Bibliography Index

'Paul Murphy excavates some neglected Irish drama, and re-reads more familiar plays, with an arrestingly original combination of historical and psychoanalytical insight. This is a brave, trenchant work, which probes away most rewardingly at the rich seam where history and fantasy meet.' - Terry Eagleton, John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory, University of Manchester, UK

'In a superbly argued and well theorised book, Paul Murphy shifts the narrative of Irish theatre history beyond nation formation and into the very productive terrain of the class and gender of the country's subalterns in performance.' Brian Singleton, Head of Drama, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; President, International Federation for Theatre Research

'Theoretically informed and critically focused, this book is a searching exploration of Irish drama in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on Lacan and i ek, Murphy demonstrates how central to the construction of that drama were the Peasant and the Woman as symbolic forms onto which political desires could be and were projected. The issue of class is introduced and that of gender extended in a series of meticulous and historicised readings which val“)