Dublin By Lamplight

Martyn Wallace awoke in his boarding house and held his aching head. His room was brown and dirty and bare. He called it Reading Gaol. Amidst the filth and fury of Dublin 1904, the theatrical event of the century is about to explode! Fading stars, rebels, whores and romantics irreverently expose the strange and lurid world of Dublin by Lamplight. An instant hit when it first opened in 2004, this hugely entertaining and anarchic production is a night to change a nation's destiny! Unless it all goes horribly wrong . . . Written by Michael West in collaboration with Corn Exchange theatre company, Dublin by Lamplight was first produced at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2004, before a transfer to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2005. This new edition of the playscript was published to coincide with a major revival at the Abbey Theatre in spring 2017

"The Detective and the Cowboy," "Wondering Where All the Dust Comes From," "Ejaculations and Silence," and "Where the Corkscrew Was" these are Garry Leonard's chapter titles for his readings of four of the stories, "An Encounter," "Eveline," "The Boarding House," and "Clay." The titles convey the freshness and thoughtfulness that are indicative of all of Leonard's new readings of these fifteen often-read stories. Leonard begins with an excellent overview of Lacan and proceeds to examine each story in a separate chapter. Lacan's rethinking of human subjectivity plays throughout the book and ultimately unites it. Not only does Leonard's work preserve the complex interplay between Lacanian theory and Joyce's texts, but also completes another and no less significant project: the rescuing of Dubliners from the category of "easy Joyce." Throughout the readings the relevance of Lacan's ideas to feminist theory is emphasized in order to examine both what Lacan terms the "masquerade of femininity" and the equally illusory power structure of the "masculine subject." The frequent and jargon-free explications of Lacan's terms and theories, coupled with a close reading of each of the stories, makes this a book to be consulted by anyone wishing to explore new ways to approach Dubliners, new ways to read these rich stories again.

The first book to tackle the controversial history of prostitution in modern Ireland.

This is a series of connected essays by one of today's leading commentators on James Joyce.

A highly original exploration of Joyce's engagement with sexual questions.

Because the stories in James Joyce's Dubliners seem to function as models of fiction, they are able to stand in for fiction in general in their ability to make the operation of texts explicit and visible. Joyce's stories do this by provoking skepticism in the face of their storytelling. Their narrative unreliabilities—produced by strange gaps, omitted scenes, and misleading narrative prompts—arouse suspicion and oblige the reader to distrust how and why the story is told. As a result, one is prompted to look into what is concealed, omitted, or left unspoken, a quest that often produces interpretations in conflict with what the narrative surface suggests about characters and events. Margot Norris's strategy in her analysis of the stories in Dubliners is to refuse to take the narrative voice for granted and to assume that every authorial decision to include or exclude, or to represent in a particular way, may be read as motivated. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners examines the text for counterindictions and draws on the social context of the writing in order to offer readings from diverse theoretical perspectives. Suspicious Readings of Joyce's Dubliners devotes a chapter to each of the fifteen stories in Dubliners and shows how each confronts the reader with an interpretive challenge and an intellectual adventure. Its readings of "An Encounter," "Two Gallants," "A Painful Case," "A Mother," "The Boarding House," and "Grace" reconceive the stories in wholly novel ways—ways that reveal Joyce's writing to be even more brilliant, more exciting, and more seriously attuned to moral and political issues than we had thought.

Ireland in the 1990s experienced fast, immediate, and radical social change. Dubbed the “Celtic Tiger,” the Irish economy provided for changes in the arts landscape as well, particularly as an outlet for the expression of this change. A profound shift in Irish drama, expressed as an attempt to redefine what a play is, what an audience is – regardless of the theme of the work – allowed for a replication of this societal change in the theatre. Theatre artists collaborating to bring physicality to the Irish stage sought to explore, express, and reflect a part of society that they felt could not be represented naturalistically. They rejected nostalgia and indeed often mocked it. The newly emerging Irish theatre de-privileged the author and moved away from the literary tradition to incorporate performance techniques and movement on an equal basis to the written text. These productions emphasized the visual because artists found that words alone could not express the inchoate emotions brought on by globalization and cultural shifts. Breaking Forms is an attempt to provide a vocabulary for talking about Irish performance and an incursion in the understanding and definition of the idea of Irish gesture. The manuscript profiles several theatre companies to find common ground and provide an analysis of their performances, theatre, and texts.