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Brendan Behan's only novel, Borstal Boy (1958), elicits a certain style of reading, which has an aesthetic and a political element. The first-person narrator and central protagonist is a teenage boy named Brendan Behan, and the experiences he narrates accord closely with those of Brendan Behan, the author. In December 1939 Behan, then aged 16, was arrested in Liverpool, having just arrived there from Dublin. He was found guilty of possessing explosives and sentenced to three years detention in borstal. In all he spent just under two years in
Revolutionary bodies traces a style of homoerotic writing in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction. As this study demonstrates, writers in that tradition explored a broad spectrum of cultural and political concerns, while experimenting with the conventions of literary realism. We witness how, in these various works, the longing for the male body is insistently associated with utopian political desire. Developing a series of innovative readings, the argument proceeds through three author-centred chapters (Brendan Behan; John Broderick; Colm Tóibín) followed by two chapters on Irish gay fiction and ‘Celtic Tiger’ fiction. The latter two chapters focus on work by Keith Ridgway, Jamie O’Neill, Micheál Ó Conghaile and Barry McCrea, among others. Revolutionary Bodies prompts us to reconsider the relationship between aesthetics, literature and sexual liberation.
1995 ). What is being discussed here is the moment of ‘Anger’ and ‘Working Class Realism’ in the theatre, symbolised by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), the plays of Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Shelagh Delaney, Brendan Behan, John Arden and Edward Bond, much of the work of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, and of Theatre Workshop at Stratford East: in television, it is it is largely, though by no means exclusively, the BBC Wednesday Play anthology that is the most visible symbol of this moment. The key texts are Up the Junction (BBC
artist with a more public and less elitist reputation as best embodied by Brendan Behan or Patrick Kavanagh. For O’Faoláin The Bell was about producing a sustained, low-key criticism of life and art in Éire. He wanted to slowly build up standards in line with other international magazines by publishing the best of Irish talent alongside the best of international talent. As he reminded O’Connor, The Bell was not a blast of explosive experimentalism, but the slow boil of creative criticism: We do not keep a dog that barks. You will recollect that we set out to be a
of Irish literature. There is, for instance, a well-known poster of Irish writers that showcases, against a sepia background, the names, brief biographies, and photographs of twelve authors who are seen to stand as testament to the quality of Irish literature: J. M. Synge, Flann O’Brien, Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, W. B. Yeats, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanagh, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, and George Bernard Shaw. This specifically gendered accumulation of the country’s literati is not altogether surprising: Irish writing has often
17 ‘Goodnight and joy be with you all’: tales of contemporary Dublin city life1 Loredana Salis Tales of Dublin city life are a significant feature of Irish literature and drama. From Joyce’s Dubliners to plays by Seán O’Casey, Brendan Behan, Hugh Leonard, Bernard Farrell, and, more recently, Conor McPherson and Mark O’Rowe, Dublin and its people have definitely been the protagonists of many a story. In the 1990s, Ireland’s capital city became the epicentre of a large-scale transformation, which affected both its geographical and cultural landscapes, and which
were liberating for Troy and he began to think of himself as a writer during this period, coming into contact with other writers and immersing himself in Dublin literary life: Brendan Behan lived just next door and one day he just chucked this copy of a book, which turned out to be The Borstal Boy, over. He said ‘You’re a writer, what do you make of this?’ and of course I didn’t really like it. I thought ‘Who wants to read something about a borstal boy?’, so I’d say, ‘Oh it’s very good Brendan … ’ By the end of that time, before I went into the army, I knew all those
Club’. 7 For the 1970/71 season the play list does indeed seem predicated on the tried and tested – opening with a neat combination of Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , and being followed by Brecht’s Mother Courage ,Shaw’s Saint Joan , Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey , Brendan Behan’s The Hostage , Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot
within the IRA: Peadar O’Donnell had commanded an IRA unit and occupied the Four Courts during the Civil War, Seán O’Faoláin ran the IRA propaganda unit, Frank O’Connor saw active service in North Cork, Eamon Martin was a veteran of the 1916 Rising and Róisín Walsh was a committed republican activist. Among The Bell’s more celebrated articles lie a number that are directly attributable to its connections within this IRA framework. Brendan Behan’s famous Borstal Boy (1958) was first published as ‘I Became A Borstal Boy’ in The Bell of June 1942. It is interesting to
after the collapse of the Border Campaign, the IRA’s most ambitious challenge to British rule in Northern Ireland since the 1920s. Having observed the campaign from a British jail, Goulding had avoided the taint of failure, and was one of the few experienced men available who was ready to assume leadership of the republican movement. From a working-class Dublin family, a childhood friend of the playwright Brendan Behan, Goulding was far more than a conventional Irish nationalist. His sympathy for left-wing ideology was clear, and he wanted to strengthen the political