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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Just a few years later, during the Irish Civil War, the philosopher’s name would be evoked on the floor of the Dáil Éireann (lower house of parliament) to pose the relationship between the values of the Irish people and the draconian measures of their new government as ‘a case of Christianity vs. Nietzscheanism’. Drawing on an opposition made familiar by Kettle and Allied propagandists, the remark addresses, in the bluntest terms, the issues at stake for the national conscience as Ireland entered the era of independence. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Nietzsche, despite his drubbing in the public sphere, remained an important point of reference for the foremost Irish writers as they looked beyond the tumultuous intensity of the period and embraced prophetic modes of discourse. With a peculiar admixture of mythology, cosmology, eccentric historiography, and Nietzschean ideas, Yeats sought in A Vision (1925) to offer a systematic, if highly idiosyncratic, account of the patterns of human history that might reveal something about the future. Meanwhile, in his five-part play, Back to Methuselah (1921), Shaw attempted to translate the tenets of his philosophy of Creative Evolution into the legends of a new religion of human enhancement: legends that revise the story of the Garden of Eden, comment directly on the political failings of the present, and project a posthuman future some 30,000 years hence. After the war, like many of their contemporaries, Yeats and Shaw became increasingly enamoured with the potential of eugenics to overcome the counter-selective effects of the recent conflict and to breed the human race into a fitter political animal. Joyce, for his part, demonstrates considerable scepticism about such a potential, but he was nonetheless preoccupied with human breeding and the question of futurity in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses. Among the many competing discourses that addressed these issues in Ireland and beyond, Nietzschean philosophy is again crucial, precisely because it remains open to multiple interpretations, multiple potentialities for the future of humanity, or rather a future beyond humanity, when at least certain individuals will live according to new codes, new values, and new ideals. One of the great achievements of Irish modernism, as we shall see, is that its leading writers accommodated these provocations to their own array of provocative images, metaphors, and myths, which repeatedly crossed the borders between art and society, aesthetics and politics.
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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.