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Saturday, January 22, 2005

01/22/05 - Read Ireland

Back to Irish Aires Table of Contents Advert: "Discovery Indochina is a local tour operator offering culture and sightseeing tours, adventure travel programs, discounted packages, innovative customized holidays and special interest trips throughout Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos" http://www.discoveryindochina.com (If you are considering this part of the world, we can personally recommend this company; we had a wonderful holiday with them!) ------------------------------- Read Ireland Book News - Issue 293 – Cambridge University Press Special Issue -------------------------------- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama edited by Shaun Richards (Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 290 pages) The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama fro the late nineteenth-century melodramas which anticipated the rise of the Abbey Theatre to the contemporary Dublin of theatre festivals. Further to studies of individual playwrights, the collection also includes an examination of the relationship between the theatre and its political context as this is inflected through its ideology, staging and programming. With a full chronology and bibliography, this collection is an indispensable introduction to one of the world’s most vibrant theatre cultures. -------------------------------------- The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce 2ed edited by Derek Attridge (Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 290 pages) The second edition of this guide contains several new and revised essays, reflecting increasing emphasis on Joyce’s politics, a fresh sense of the importance of his engagement with Ireland, and the changes wrought by gender studies on criticism of his work. An international team of leading scholars offers informative, stimulating essays full of rich and accessible insights which will provoke thought and discussion in and out of the classroom. ----------------------------------- A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 by Christopher Morash (Trade Paperback; 27.50 Euro / 32.50 USD / 16.00 UK; 322 pages) This widely-praised account of Irish theatre traces an often forgotten history leading up to the Irish Literary Revival. The author then follows that history to the present by creating a remarkably clear picture of the cultural contexts which produced the playwrights who have been responsible for making Irish theatre’s world-wide historical and contemporary reputation. The main chapters are each followed by short chapters, focusing on a single night at the theatre. This prize-winning book is an essential, entertaining and highly original guide to the history and performance of Irish theatre. ------------------------------------ Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’: A Student Guide by Lawrence Graver (Paperback; 16.50 Euro / 22.50 USD / 10.00 UK; 108 pages) This book offers a comprehensive critical study of Beckett’s most renowned dramatic work which has become one of the most frequently discussed and influential plays in the history of the theatre. The author discusses the play’s background and provides a detailed analysis of its originality and distinction as a landmark of modern theatrical art. He reviews some of the differences between Beckett’s original French version and his English translation, and discusses the liberating influence of the play on such important writers as Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. --------------------------------- Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: A Student Guide by Vincent Sherry (Paperback; 16.50 Euro / 22.50 USD / 10.00 UK; 108 pages) In this engaging introduction, the author combines a close reading of Joyce’s most famous novel with new critical arguments. Besides providing a useful guide to the episodic sequence of Joyce’s novel, the author freshly addresses the major issues in ‘Ulysses’ criticism. He shows how Joyce’s modernist epic remodels Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, and he examines and explains Joyce’s extraordinary verbal experiments, reading anew the most challenging language of the text. He also reclaims the landmark status of Joyce’s monumental novel, situating it in the relevant contexts of literary tradition and political history. --------------------------------- Images of Beckett by John Haynes and James Knowlson (Hardback; 30.00 Euro / 35.00 USD / 20.00 UK; 156 pages, with photos throughout) This book sets John Haynes’ unique repertoire of photographs of Beckett’s dramatic opus alongside three newly written essays by Beckett’s biographer and friend, James Knowlson. Haynes captures images of Beckett’s work in progress and performance and includes hitherto unseen portraits of Beckett himself. Haynes was privileged to be present at the Royal Court Theatre in London when Beckett directed his own plays. Among the 75 photographs are compositions that include the leading interpreters of the plays. Knowlson’s first essay combines a verbal portrait of Beckett with a personal memoir of the writer; the second considers the influence of paintings that Beckett loved or admired on his theatrical imagery; the third offers a detailed, often first-hand, account of Beckett’s work as a director of his own plays. The essays are the result of personal conversations with Beckett and attendance at rehearsals and they provide a unique glimpse into the world of one of the theatre’s most influential and enduring playwrights. --------------------------------- Beckett & Aestheitcs by Daniel Albright (Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 180 pages) This book examines Beckett’s struggle with the recalcitrance of artistic media, their refusal to yield to his artistic purposes. As a young man Beckett hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world; instead he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. In this book the author argues that Beckett escaped from this bind through allegories of artistic frustration and through an art of non-representation, estrangement, and general failure. He arrived, the author shows, at some grasp of fact through the most indirect route available. The author explores Beckett’s experimentation with the notion that an artistic medium might itself be made to speak. This powerful and highly original book explores Beckett’s own engagement with radio, film, and television, prose and drama as part of an attempt to escape the confines of the aesthetic. ------------------------------- Edmund Burke and Ireland by Luke Gibbons (Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 300 pages) This pioneering study of Edmund Burke’s engagement with Irish politics and culture argues that Burke’s influential early writings on aesthetics are intimately connected to his lifelong political concerns. The concept of the sublime, which lay at the heart of his aesthetics, addressed itself primarily to the experience of terror, and it is this spectre that haunts Burke’s political imagination throughout his career. The author argues that this anxious aesthetics found expression in his preoccupation with political terror, whether in colonial Ireland and India, or revolutionary America and France. Burke’s preoccupation with violence, sympathy, and pain allowed him to explore the dark side of the Enlightenment, but from a position no less committed to the plight of the oppressed, and to political emancipation. ------------------------------------ James Joyce and the Problems of Psychoanalysis by Luke Thurston (Hardback; 68.5.00 Euro / 80.00 USD / 45.00 UK; 232 pages) From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain, translating it as vagrant symptom or sublimated desire. Despite Joyce’s deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. In this book the author argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, the author shows that Jacques Lacan’s encounter with Joyce forms part of an effort to think beyond the ‘application’ of theory: instead of merely diagnosing Joyce’s writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. The author builds on Lacan’s notion of Joyce’s irreducible literary act to illuminate Joyce’s place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. --------------------------------- Proust, Beckett and Narration by James H. Reid (Hardback; 60.00 Euro / 72.00 USD / 40.00 UK; 192 pages) This is the first book-length comparison of the narrative techniques of two of the twentieth century’s most important prose writers. Using a combination of theoretical analysis and close readings of Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu and Beckett’s trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, the author compares the two novelists’ use of first-person narration in constructing and demystifying fictions of consciousness. The author focuses on the narrator’s searches to represent and erase a voice that speaks the novel; searches, he argues, that structure first-person narration in the works of both novelists. He examines in detail the significant impact of Proust’s writing on Beckett’s own work as well as Beckett’s subtle reworkings of Proust’s theses and strategies. ---------------------------------- Thank you for your support! It is important that if you are considering ordering any of these books that you do so through Read Ireland in order that the newsletter continues! To order books from the Read Ireland Book Review you can send an email to the order department at: greg@readireland.ie Please be sure to include your mailing address and credit card details. You can of course also post your order to: Read Ireland, 392 Clontarf Road, Clontarf, Dublin 3,Ireland. Telephone and Facsimile number is: +353-1-853-2063. Read Ireland Web Site Home Page: http://www.readireland.com All Prices and Rates are in Euro (US Dollar and UK Sterling prices are guidelines based on current exchange rates.) Euro prices on books reviewed above are firm. Post + package is charged at cost. -------------------------------------------------------- Back to Irish Aires Table of Contents
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