Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination [Hardcover]

This book explores the performance of Irish collective memories and forgotten histories. It proposes an alternative and more comprehensive criterion of Irish theatre practices. These practices can be defined as the 'rejected', contested and undervalued plays and performativities that are integral to Ireland's political and cultural landscapes.Introduction: The Rest is History; Christopher Collins and Mary P. Caulfield PART I: LEGACY AND HERITAGE 1. Walking In and Out of Place: the Pedestrian Performances of Tim Robinson; Daniel Sack 2. A Theatre of the Unword: Censorship, Hegemony, and Samuel Beckett; Nicholas Johnson 3. Re-considering Oscar Wilde's Flamboyant Flop: Vera or The Nihilists; Aideen Kerr 4. Courtly Love and Heroic Death in W.B. Yeats's Cuchulain Cycle of Plays; Paul Murphy 5. '&Whenever the Tale of '98 is told': Constance Markievicz, the National Memory and 'the women of ninety-eight'; Mary P. Caulfield 6. Theatre of Dissent: the Historical Imagination of the Irish Workers' Dramatic Company; Lauren Arrington 7. Staging the Body in Post-independence Ireland; Lionel Pilkington PART II: RECOLLECTION AND REMEMBRANCE 8. Pampooties and Keening: Alternate Ways of Performing Memory in J.M. Synge's Plays; H?l?ne Lecossois 9. 'Why do you always be singin' that oul' song?': the Subversion of Emigrant Ballads in John B. Keane's Many Young Men of Twenty; Joseph Greenwood 10. Boxed Rituals: Eamon de Valera, Television, and Talbot's Box; Michael Jaros 11. Unblessed Amongst Women: Performing Patriarchy Without Men in Contemporary Irish Theatre; Cormac O'Brien 12. The Abuse of History/a History of Abuse: Theatre as Memory and the Abbey's 'darkest corner'; Emilie Pine 13. Forgetting Follow; Christopher Collins Bibliography Index

While it might appear a purely historical book, Ireland, Memory and Performing the Historical Imagination ensures that the past is interrogated with the lens of current concernstheatrically, theoretically, and philosoplÃf