Description:
Professor Murray, of University College, Dublin, has given the full biography of O'Casey, a shapeshifter as much as his dramatized characters in his name-changing, cap-donning, and ego-tripping (to use a later phrase). Like Roy Foster's massive biography of Yeats, or Anthony Cronin's on Beckett, this work gains much having been written by not only a fine scholar but a Irish writer who knows his country well and can convey it with verve and precision to a broader readership outside academia.
This study blends the literary criticism of Murray, an authority on modern Irish drama, with a scrupulous examination incorporating deta
Professor Murray, of University College, Dublin, has given the full biography of O'Casey, a shapeshifter as much as his dramatized characters in his name-changing, cap-donning, and ego-tripping (to use a later phrase). Like Roy Foster's massive biography of Yeats, or Anthony Cronin's on Beckett, this work gains much having been written by not only a fine scholar but a Irish writer who knows his country well and can convey it with verve and precision to a broader readership outside academia.
This study blends the literary criticism of Murray, an authority on modern Irish drama, with a scrupulous examination incorporating details from those still living who recalled O'Casey. He supports this by a massive array of primary and secondary sources--the endnotes and bibliography amount to nearly 100 pages. Murray writes for the general reader clearly and sensitively, eschewing jargon in favor of direct, spare, and clear prose. He takes you all the way from late Victorian times to "the new and bland Ireland" of 2004, in a thoughtful chapter on the "afterlife' of O'Casey's current reputation, vs. that in an Ireland that had spurned him, and vice versa, for so much of the 20th century.
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Manufacturer: McGill-Queen's University Press
Release date: 30 January 2005
ISBN-10 : 077352889X |
ISBN-13: 9780773528895
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