The Profane Book of Irish Comedy / / David Krause.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Krause, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1982
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (352 p.)

A fierce mirth characterizes antic Irish comedy. To the degree to which everyone sympathizes with the need to mock repressive authority, everyone is potentially Irish. It is the Irish dramatists themselves, says David Krause, that are the true authors of the profane book of Irish comedy. The body of literature they have produced desecrates the sacred in Ireland and launches a sardonic attack on the queen of Irish nationalism, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, the old sow who, according to Joyce's tragicomic jest, tries to devour her creative farrow.Krause discusses the major works of fourteen Irish playwrights—Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Dion Boucicault, William Boyle, Paul Vincent Carroll, George Fitzmaurice, Lady Gregory, Denis Johnston, Sean O'Casey, Lennox Robinson, Bernard Shaw, George Shields, J. M. Synge, and W. B. Yeats—and shows the ways in which these works are linked, emotionally and thematically, to early Gaelic literature and the tradition of the mythic pagan playboy Oisin or Usheen.As the last great pagan hero of Ireland, Oisin emerges as an archetype for the many playboys and paycocks of Irish comedy. Oisin was the antithesis of St. Patrick, the first great Christian saint of Ireland, who, condemning pleasure and threatening eternal damnation, came to represent all authority. The bearers of this dark and wild Celtic tradition, which Synge and O'Casey associated with a daimonic or barbarous impulse, laugh irreverently at their own creations. This laughter, the laughter of the culture's mythmakers, brings with it emotional relief, comic catharsis.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- Chapter 1. THE BARBAROUS SYMPATHIES OF ANTIC IRISH COMEDY -- Chapter 2. THE HIDDEN OISÍN -- Chapter 3. THE COMIC DESECRATION OF Ireland’s household gods -- Chapter 4. MANNERS AND MORALS IN IRISH COMEDY -- Chapter 5. THE VICTORY OF COMIC DEFEAT -- NOTES AND COMMENTS -- INDEX