A Reader’s Guide to Modern Irish Drama

This book includes information on the most recent and youngest playwrights working today at the Abbey, Druid, and Lyric Theatres. Sanford Sternlicht discusses the important plays of all the playwrights included and the major themes of modern Irish drama.

A Readers Guide to Modern Irish Drama provides
an introduction to one of the great dramatic and theatrical
traditions of Western culture. Professor
Sanford Stemlicht wrote this book specifically for
Syracuse University Press’s Reader’s Guides series.
As one of only a handful of comprehensive contemporary
studies of Irish drama, the book includes
the most recent and youngest playwrights working today at the Abbey, Druid, and Lyric Theatres.

Beginning with essays on twentieth-century Irish history, The Irish Literary Theatre, and the development
of the Modem, Irish Theatre in Dublin, Belfast, Galway and other cities, the guide presents biographies and bibliographies of more than twenty-five major twentieth-century Irish dramatists from Lady Gregory, Yeats, and Synge to O’Casey, Beckett, and Behan; from Friel and McGuinness to Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh.

Most significantly, Sternlicht discusses the important plays of all the playwrights included, and the major themes of modem Irish drama-the struggle for independence, the cruelty of poverty, the pains of emigration and exile, the decline of the Anglo-Irish ascendency, the power of religion, the longing for land, and the familial and gender conflicts of a people in transition. Finally, a selected bibliography completes the study.

Sanford Sternlicht teaches English at Syracuse University. He is the author of numerous books. Most recently he coedited with Christopher FitzSimon, New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, 1993- 1995, and has edited the Selected Plays, Poems, and Stories of Padraic Colum.