Women and Embodied Mythmaking in Irish Theatre

Provides an historical overview of women's mythmaking and thus their contributions to, and an alternative genealogy of, modern Irish theatre.

Shonagh Hill (Author)

9781108485333, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 August 2019

266 pages
23.4 x 15.9 x 1.7 cm, 0.56 kg

'Shonagh Hill's magisterial study offers many new aspects in the rather well-researched field of drama and myth. Moreover, with its focus on mythmaking by women, it revises the traditional male-dominated canon of Irish drama and provides an alternative history of theatre and performance (not only) in Ireland. The book develops a complex theoretical framework of genealogical writing, covers abroad range of dramatic texts in the widest sense (including ballet and tableaux vivants) and manages to enrich the textual analyses by means of close readings of the productions of the plays … the book is well-written and … clear …' Anette Pankratz, Anglia

The rich legacy of women's contributions to Irish theatre is traditionally viewed through a male-dominated literary canon and mythmaking, thus arguably silencing their work. In this timely book, Shonagh Hill proposes a feminist genealogy which brings new perspectives to women's mythmaking across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The performances considered include the tableaux vivants performed by the Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), plays written by Alice Milligan, Maud Gonne, Lady Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Mary Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy, Paula Meehan, Edna O'Brien and Marina Carr, as well as plays translated, adapted and performed by Olwen Fouéré. The theatrical work discussed resists the occlusion of women's cultural engagement that results from confinement to idealised myths of femininity. This is realised through embodied mythmaking: a process which exposes how bodies bear the consequences of these myths, while refusing to accept the female body as passive bearer of inscription through the assertion of a creative female corporeality.

Introduction: a creative female corporeality
1. Revolutionary bodies: mythmaking and Irish feminisms
2. Unhomely bodies: transforming space
3. Process and resistance: metamorphic 'bodies that matter'
4. Staging female death: sacrificial and dying bodies
5. Haunted bodies and violent pasts
6. Olwen Fouéré's Corpus: the performer's body and her body of work.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Theatre studies [AN], The arts [A]