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Goodbye Yeats and O'Neill is a reading of one or two books recently written by the following major authors: Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, John McGahern, William Trevor, Seamus Deane, Nuala O'Faolain, Patrick McCabe, Colum McCann, Nick Laird, Gerry Adams, Claire Boylan, Frank McCourt, Tim O'Brien, Michael Patrick MacDonald, Alice McDermott, Edward J. Delaney, Beth Lordan, William Kennedy, Thomas Kelly, and Mary Gordon. The study argues that farce has been a major mode of recent Irish and Irish-American fiction and memoir--a primary indicator of the state of both Irish and Irish-American cultures in the early twenty-first century.

Elizabeth von Arnim and Elizabeth Taylor wrote witty and entertaining novels about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Widely read and enjoyed, their work was often dismissed as middlebrow. Brown argues their skilful use of comedy and irony provided the receptive reader with subversive commentary on the cruelties and disappointments of life.

In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity. \"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture.\"--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.

May Sinclair's The Creators is a study of a group of writers and would-be writers and their struggles and/or accommodations withing the literary marketplace. It deals with the trials and tribulations of literary celebrity and with lack of recognition. It also focuses on the doubts and self-divisions of the artist and on his or her battles with conventional gender roles. The novel's subtitle - 'a comedy' - puzzled some of its first readers and reviewers, the TLS to speculate that the comedy must lie in that fact that the creators believe that they are geniuses. Sinclair does not take her characters as seriously as they take themselves, but her social comedy also exposes the limitations of the conventional middle-class world which either exploits or fails to understand them. First serialized in the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine between November 1909 and October 1910, The Creators was first published in book form by John Constable in 1910. This edition restored the numerous and extensive cuts that were made to Sinclair's manuscript during the process of the novel's serialization.

Finley Peter Dunne, American journalist and humorist, is justly famous for his creation of Mr. Dooley, the Chicago Irish barkeep whose weekly commentary on national politics, war, and human nature kept Americans chuckling over their newspapers for nearly two decades at the beginning of this century. Largely forgotten in the files of Chicago newspapers, however, are over 300 Mr. Dooley columns written in the 1890s before national syndication made his name a household word. Charles Fanning offers here the first critical examination of these early Dooley pieces, which, far better than the later ones, reveal the depth and development of the character and his creator. Dunne created in Mr. Dooley a vehicle for expressing his criticism of Chicago's corruption despite the conservatism of most of his publishers. Dishonest officials who could not be safely attacked in plain English could be roasted with impunity in the \"pure Roscommon brogue\" of a fictional comic Irishman. In addition, Dunne painted, through the observations of his comic persona, a vivid and often poignant portrait of the daily life of Chicago's working-class Irish community and the impact of assimilation into American life. He also offered cogent views of American urban political life, already dominated by the Irish as firmly in Chicago as in other large American cities, and of the tragicomic phenomenon of Irish nationalism. Mr. Fanning's penetrating examination of these early Dooley pieces clearly establishes Dunne as far more than a mere humorist. Behind Mr. Dooley's marvelously comic pose and ironic tone lies a wealth of material germane to the social and literary history of turn-of-the century America.

(1932– ), Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in London, the daughter of Sean O'Faolain, educated at University College, Dublin, with further study at the University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. ...