The Glamour of Grammar Orality and Politics and the Emergence of Sean O'Casey

Subjects:

• Literature » Drama

Reviews:

• Collections supporting Irish literature at all levels.
  —Choice

• Endorsement From Christopher Murray
  Professor of Drama
  Department of English
  University College Dublin: Aware that in modern drama language is the key to achievement, Colbert Kearney explores in fine detail O'Casey's extraordinarily skilled uses of rhetoric, imagery, and dialog in the making of the three Dublin plays on which his reputations rests. Kearney's thesis, that O'Casey here successfully yokes oral to literary tradition to create a living stage speech, is put to the test with scrupulous attention to O'Casey's texts, and the result is a book which sparkles with originality, intelligent comment, and challenging re-assessments.
• Endorsement From Declan Kiberd
  Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama
  University College Dublin: O'Casey, like his characters, lived through the transition from ancient oral codes to those of a literate modernity. For him every word was not just a medium but an action, a register of moral growth and social meaning. Colbert Kearney's book shows that the writer was as much a poet as a playwright. Though wonderfully alert to the political forces at work in O'Casey's Dublin, Kearney convinces us that the plays will live by virtue of their style. His musical analyses of the great speeches remind us that it can still be a real adventure to explore the world of a writer through the nuances of language. O'Casey's defenders and detractors must now treat him as an artist or not at all. This is one of those rare, luminous studies which restores to a writer's work something of its original strangeness, before it became surrounded by polemic.
• Endorsement From Bernard O'Donoghue
  Fellow
  Wadham College, Oxford
  Lecturer in English
  Oxford University: Professor Kearney's book on O'Casey is a major landmark in the study of the language of Irish literature in English. He has the inside knowledge of the language to analyze with confidence, not afraid to recognize excesses and inaccuracies as well as felicities. Principally with reference to the Dublin trilogy, Kearney shows how such things as malapropism, rough phonetics and cliché work within a literary language founded in the oral and the illiterate, placing O'Casey in relation to Shaw and Boucicault. This lucid and witty book carriers its learning with grace and lightness, making it a major contribution to the critical placing of O'Casey as well as to the understanding of his language. It is a brilliant performance.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• Hilljoy Square at the Turn of the Century
• John/Johnny/Jack/Seaghan/Seán/Sean
• O'Casey and the Theatre up to 1922
• A Peculiar Aptness for Character
• Juno and the Cliche
• The Grammar of Assent
• Beyond the Beyonds
• Selected Bibliography
• Index