Stage Irish

Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation brings together chapters which revisit and reconsider diverse modes of (mis)representing, performing, articulating, witnessing, constructing, and deconstructing 'Irishness' from a twenty-first-century vantage. The time is ripe for such an inquiry. The Celtic Tiger and Brexit, the Marriage Equality referendum and the #Repealthe8th and #WakingTheFeminists campaigns compel us to turn to history and representation (in literature, drama, art, music, film, television, non-fiction, popular, and digital culture) to reassess how 'Irishness' has been shaped and reshaped through parochial, national, and international performances and gazes as a variously class-coded, gendered, sexual, religious, national, and artistic identity. This focus on the cultural, societal, historical, and political interfaces between performance, performativity, spectatorship, and identity in diverse Irish and international contexts reveals tensions between self-image and Othering, innovation and cliché, cultural production and negotiated reception.


Contents:Introduction: Transcultural Refractions and Receptions of Irishness on Page, Stage, and Screen (Paul Fagan, Dieter Fuchs, Tamara Radak) - Groves of Blarney: Fake Songs, Mock-Hoaxes, and Stage Irish Identity in William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony (Paul Fagan) - Staging Irishness in the Transnational Marketing of Local Colour Fiction (Marguérite Corporaal) - Staging Irishness in Ethel Colburn Mayne's "The Happy Day" (Elke D'hoker) - Dion Boucicault, Arrah-na-Pogue, and Stage Irishry in Finnegans Wake (Richard Barlow) - Austria and the Irish Paddy: Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock Staged in 1930 and 1934 Vienna (Dieter Fuchs) - "And Trieste, ah Trieste...": Stage Ascendancy and Charles Lever's Irish Characters (Elisabetta d'Erme) - James Joyce and the Slovenians: Auto- and Hetero-Stereotypes (Igor Maver) - "Beguiling Shenanigans": Ireland and Hollywood Animation 1947-1959