Featuring twelve original essays by leading Beckett scholars and media theorists, this book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between Beckett and media technologies. The chapters analyse the rich variety of technical objects, semiotic arrangements, communication processes and forms of data processing that Beckett’s work so uniquely engages with, as well as those that – in historically changing configurations – determine the continuing performance, the audience reception, and the scholarly study of this work. Greatly enlarging the scope of earlier discussions, the book draws on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, such as media archaeology, in order to discuss Beckett’s intermedial oeuvre. As such it engages with Beckett as a media artist and examine the way his engagement with media technologies continues to speak to our cultural situation.
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An important aim throughout Nietzsche and Irish modernism is to reexamine the relationship between literature and philosophy by rigorously historicising their encounter in modern Irish culture. After the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Nietzsche’s name quickly became prominent in Irish (and English) newspapers as shorthand for a ‘Gospel of the Devil’, associated with German militarism and its perceived threat to Christian civilisation. Chapter 4 documents the emergence of this strain of propaganda in the writings of Thomas Kettle, who wrote an introduction to Daniel Halevy’s The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1911), which expounds on ‘the duel between Nietzsche and civilisation’, even as it dismisses his philosophy as nothing more than a rather vivid form of poetry. Three years later, on a gun-running mission for the Irish Republic Brotherhood, Kettle witnessed the so-called Rape of Belgium and immediately wrote a series of articles for the Daily News, attributing the rapid escalation of German belligerence to Nietzsche’s destructive influence. Within a few short weeks, a host of Irish clerics reaffirmed the connection, as they negotiated their difficult position between the Home Rule cause and the British war effort by arguing in the popular press that Ireland and England must stand together against the ‘poison doctrines’ of the German philosopher. By November 1914, Yeats could rather mischievously evoke Nietzsche’s name in Kettle’s presence at a nationalist celebration, drawing rousing applause from the Dublin audience for this now explicitly anti-British (if also anti-Christian) figure. During the course of the war, the Nietzsche controversy raged on in newspapers across the Allied powers, while Yeats remained largely silent about the conflict and its catastrophic impact on Western civilisation. But, in January 1919, only days after the armistice was signed, he would return to some of Nietzsche’s most provocative tropes in a series of allusions in ‘The Second Coming’, a poem that famously responds to the trauma of the war years by transforming the imagery of Christian faith into a nightmarish vision of the Antichrist. The final section of the chapter focuses on Yeats’s poem in the context of the Nietzsche controversy in order to read it in terms of the philosopher’s radical transvaluation of its values, which suggests a daunting future for both postwar Europe and postcolonial Ireland.
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Pageantry and power
A cultural history of the early modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585-1639
The London Lord Mayors' Shows were high-profile and lavish entertainments that were at the centre of the cultural life of the City of London in the early modern period. The Show was staged annually to celebrate the inauguration of the new Lord Mayor. The London mayoralty was not simply an entity of civic power, but always had its ritual and ceremonial dimensions. Pageantry was a feature of the day's entertainment. This book focuses on the social, cultural and economic contexts, in which the Shows were designed, presented and experienced, and explores the Shows in textual, historical, bibliographical, and archival and other contexts. It highlights the often-overlooked roles of the artificer and those other craftsmen who contributed so valuably to the day's entertainment. The Show was the concern of the Great Twelve livery companies from the ranks of one of which the Lord Mayor was elected. The book discusses, inter alia, the actors' roles, the props, music and costumes used during the Show and looks at how important emblems and imagery were to these productions. Pageant writers and artificers took advantage of the space available to them just as dramatists did on the professional stage. From 1585 onwards the Lord Mayor's Show was with increasing frequency transmitted from event to text in the form of short pamphlets produced in print runs ranging from 200 to 800 copies. The book also demonstrates the ways in which the Shows engaged with the changing socio-economic scene of London and with court and city politics.
Irish literature since 1990
Diverse voices
This book focuses on the drama and poetry published since 1990. It also reflects upon related forms of creative work in this period, including film and the visual and performing arts. The book discusses some of the most topical issues which have emerged in Irish theatre since 1990. It traces the significance of the home in the poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke. The book also focuses on the reconfigurations of identity, and the complex intersections of nationality, gender and race in contemporary Ireland. It shows how Roddy Doyle's return to the repressed gives articulation to those left behind by globalisation. The book then examines the ways in which post-Agreement Northern fiction negotiates its bitter legacies. It also examines how the activity of creating art in a time of violence brings about an anxiety regarding the artist's role, and how it calls into question the ability to re-present atrocity. The book further explores the consideration of politics and ethics in Irish drama since 1990. It talks about the swirling abundance of themes and trends in contemporary Irish fiction and autobiography. The book shows that writing in the Irish Republic and in the North has begun to accommodate an increasing diversity of voices which address themselves not only to issues preoccupying their local audiences, but also to wider geopolitical concerns.