Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation brings together chapters which revisit and reconsider diverse modes of (mis)representing, performing, articulating, witnessing, constructing, and deconstructing ‘Irishness’ from a twenty-first-century vantage. The time is ripe for such an inquiry. The Celtic Tiger and Brexit, the Marriage Equality referendum and the #Repealthe8th and #WakingTheFeminists campaigns compel us to turn to history and representation (in literature, drama, art, music, film, television, non-fiction, popular, and digital culture) to reassess how ‘Irishness’ has been shaped and reshaped through parochial, national, and international performances and gazes as a variously class-coded, gendered, sexual, religious, national, and artistic identity. This focus on the cultural, societal, historical, and political interfaces between performance, performativity, spectatorship, and identity in diverse Irish and international contexts reveals tensions between self-image and Othering, innovation and cliché, cultural production and negotiated reception.


Contents: Introduction: Transcultural Refractions and Receptions of Irishness on Page, Stage, and Screen (Paul Fagan, Dieter Fuchs, Tamara Radak) – Groves of Blarney: Fake Songs, Mock-Hoaxes, and Stage Irish Identity in William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony (Paul Fagan) – Staging Irishness in the Transnational Marketing of Local Colour Fiction (Marguérite Corporaal) – Staging Irishness in Ethel Colburn Mayne’s “The Happy Day” (Elke D’hoker) – Dion Boucicault, Arrah-na-Pogue, and Stage Irishry in Finnegans Wake (Richard Barlow) – Austria and the Irish Paddy: Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock Staged in 1930 and 1934 Vienna (Dieter Fuchs) – “And Trieste, ah Trieste…”: Stage Ascendancy and Charles Lever’s Irish Characters (Elisabetta d’Erme) – James Joyce and the Slovenians: Auto- and Hetero-Stereotypes (Igor Maver) – “Beguiling Shenanigans”: Ireland and Hollywood Animation 1947-1959 (Michael Connerty) – Object Lessons and Staged Irishness in Darby O’Gill and the Little People (Michelle Witen) – ‘Wear Something Green’: The Re-Invention of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade (Eimer Murphy) – Deconstructing Stereotypes and Othering Through Humour in Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls (Verónica Membrive) – Reconfigurations of Gender in Contemporary Irish Stage Adaptations, 2019-2020: Deirdre Kinahan’s The Unmanageable Sisters, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Marina Carr’s Hecuba, and Michael West’s Solar Bones (Anne Fogarty) – Set Piece, Set Peace? Negative Emotions and the Possibility of Change in Recent Stage Images of the North (Clare Wallace) – Regarding the Rights of Others: Spectres of the Middle East in Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of Baghdad (Natasha Remoundou)