Saint Oscar and Other Plays [Paperback]

This is the first collection of Terry Eagleton's work for the theatre - St Oscar, The White, the Gold and the Gangrene, Disappearances, and Gods Locusts. The first two originally toured Ireland respectively in productions by Field Day of Derry and Dubbeljoint of Belfast. God's Locusts was broadcast on BBC Radio 3.Introduction.

Saint Oscar.

The White, the Gold and the Gangrene.

Disappearances.

God's Locusts.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His The Illusions of Postmodernism appeared from Blackwell in 1996, as did the Second Edition of his classic Literary Theory: An Introduction and Marxist Literary Theory, co-edited with Drew Milne. The Eagleton Reader, edited by Stephen Regan, is forthcoming from Blackwell. Eagleton's numerous other works include Heathcliff and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), William Shakespeare (1986), Walter Benjamin (1976), Criticism and Ideology (1976), and Marxism and Literary Theory (1976).Terry Eagleton's plays in this first collection of his work for the theatre - St Oscar, The White, the Gold and the Gangrene, Disappearances, and God's Locusts - transgress what he terms 'the jealously patrolled frontiers between `art` and `idea`'. In spirit they owe at least as much to Oscar Wilde, the Irish Oxfordian socialist and proto-deconstructionist, as, for example in their use of prose and ballad forms, they do to Bertolt Brecht.

Eagleton sees in Wilde's work 'a kind of secret compact' between artistic and theoretical experiment. A similar compact emerges in these startling dramas of (post)colonial Ireland andls(