Out of History

Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry

Christina Hunt Mahony

• Publisher: Peter Lang Group
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788749510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Out of History is the first book to appear on the work of award-winning Irish author Sebastian Barry. Barry is recognized as one of Ireland's greatest living writers and his works now appear regularly on syllabuses in U.S.colleges, in Irish Studies and in Drama departments. This book, edited by Christina Hunt Mahony, presents twelve essays that trace the development of the writer's career and the individual achievement of his works, concentrating largely, but not exclusively, on the plays. The essays address Barry's engagement with the contemporary cultural debate in Ireland and also with issues that inform postcolonlal critical theory.

The essays in this volume include contributions from the most prominent of Irish Studies critics from Ireland, Britain, and the United States. Among the contributors are two prize-winning novelists, a historian and recent biographer of the poet W.B. Yeats, a former editor of Poetry Ireland, and several theatre historians and critics. The range and selection of contributors to this volume has ensured a high level of critical expression and an insightful assessment of Barry and his works.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Information
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Introduction/ Christina Hunt Mahony
• 2 From Rhetoric to Narrative: The Poems of Sebastian Barry/ Peter Denman
• 3 Transcending Genre: Sebastian Barry’s Juvenile Fiction/ Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
• 4 ‘To have a father is always big news’: Theme and Structure in The Engine of Owl-Light/ Bruce Stewart
• 5 ‘Everyman’s story is the whisper of God’: Sacred and Secular in Barry’s Dramaturgy/ David Cregan
• 6 Children of the Light amid the ‘risky dancers’: Barry’s Naïfs and the Poetry of Humanism/ Christina Hunt Mahony
• 7 ‘All the long traditions’: Loyalty and Service in Barry and Ishiguro/ John Wilson Foster
• 8 Colonial Policing: The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty/ Elizabeth Butler Cullingford
• 9 Redressing the Irish Theatrical Landscape: Sebastian Barry’s The Only True History of Lizzie Finn/ Anthony Roche
• 10 Out of History: from The Steward of Christendom to Annie Dunne/ Nicholas Grene
• 11 ‘Something of us will remain’: Sebastian Barry and Irish History/ Roy Foster
• 12 Hinterland The Public Becomes Private/ Colm Tóibín
• 13 ‘In the dank margins of things’: Whistling Psyche and the Illness of Empire/ Claire Gleitman
• Bibliography of Works of Sebastian Barry
• Contributors
• Endnotes
• Index