scholarly journals Kate O'Brien in the Theatre

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moran
Keyword(s):  
Middle Classes ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Literary Reputation ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
British System ◽  
Kate O'brien

Kate O'Brien initially made her literary reputation as a dramatist rather than a novelist. Her debut play Distinguished Villa (1926) won acclaim in London when first produced onstage, and critics compared her with Seán O'Casey. However, O'Brien's dramatic work manifests some key differences to O'Casey, not least O'Brien's recurring concern with the behavioural norms and sexual predilections of the English middle-classes, and her early awareness of the requirements of the British censor. Although O'Brien is remembered as a figure who transgressed the censorship rules of the Irish government, it was the British system of censorship she first had to navigate.

‘Our own fastidious John Jordan’: Poet, Literary Editor, Critic

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh McFadden
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Women Authors ◽  
English Drama ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Austin Clarke ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Brendan Behan ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
Staunch Advocate

For more than three decades, John Jordan (1930–88) was one of the most astute and perceptive literary critics in Ireland. As editor of the magazine Poetry Ireland in the Sixties he helped to revive Dublin as a significant literary centre, maintaining friendships with Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, and Austin Clarke. Himself a poet in the late modernist mode and a writer of witty and idiosyncratic short stories about the bohemian Dublin of the Forties and Fifties, Jordan was equally well-known as a drama critic, a staunch advocate of the later plays of Sean O'Casey, a defender of Joyce and Beckett, and a champion of the work of women authors including Kate O'Brien and the playwright Teresa Deevy. A child prodigy who corresponded with the famous English drama critic James Agate and evaluated play scripts for Edwards and MacLiammóir at the Gate Theatre, where he also acted, John Jordan distinguished himself as a scholarship student at Pembroke College Oxford and at UCD, where he lectured brilliantly on English literature. He was also a noted broadcaster on radio and TV programmes such as the Thomas Davis Lectures, Sunday Miscellany, and the TV book programme Folio.

Democratizing Abolitionism: Anti-slavery Discourses and Sentiments in August von Kotzebue's Die Negersklaven (1796)

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
German States ◽  
Political Sources ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Peripheral Position ◽  
Histoire Des Deux Indes ◽  
Political Leverage

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.

Palestinian Diaspora Communities in Latin America and Palestinian Statehood

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Yousef M. Aljamal ◽  
Philipp O. Amour
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
South America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Right

There are some 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, living in fourteen countries of South America. In particular, Palestinian diaspora communities have a considerable presence in Chile, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many members of these communities belong to the professional middle classes, a situation which enables them to play a prominent role in the political and economic life of their countries. The article explores the evolving attitudes of Latin American Palestinians towards the issue of Palestinian statehood. It shows the growing involvement of these communities in Palestinian affairs and their contribution in recent years towards the wide recognition of Palestinian rights — including the right to self-determination and statehood — in Latin America. But the political views of members of these communities also differ considerably about the form and substance of a Palestinian statehood and on the issue of a two-states versus one-state solution.

No ‘Help to the Imagination’: Kate O'Brien and the Emergency

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112
Author(s):  
Anna Teekell
Keyword(s):  
Complex Space ◽  
Coercive Power ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
Kate O'brien ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Love Triangle

Kate O'Brien's 1943 The Last of Summer has been read as the novelist's riposte to an insular island that stifled both her publishing (through censorship) and her imagination (through cultural conservatism). Set on the eve of the neutral ‘Emergency’, O'Brien's sixth novel actually depicts Ireland as a complex space of negotiation, simultaneously desirable and condemnable, that challenges, rather than stifles, the individual imagination. The Last of Summer is a love triangle and a battle of wits, pitching a stage actress, the French ingénue Angèle, against an accomplished domestic performer, her potential mother-in-law, Hannah Kernahan. In the end, it is Hannah who wields ‘neutrality’ – both Ireland's in the war and her pretended neutrality in family matters – as a form of coercive power.

Preface to ‘The Art of Writing’ by Kate O'Brien

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-144
Author(s):  
Christopher Murray
Keyword(s):  
Kate O'brien

Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf: Common Ground

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Literary Influences ◽  
Kate O'brien

Convergences in the work of Kate O'Brien and Virginia Woolf range from literary influences and political alignments, to a shared approach to narrative point of view, structure, or conceptual use of words. Common ground includes existentialist preoccupations and tropes, a pacifism which did not hinder support for the left in the Spanish Civil War, the linking of feminism and decolonization, an affinity with anarchism, the identification of the normativity of fascism, and a determination to represent deviant sexualities and affects. Making evident the importance of the connection, O'Brien conceived and designed The Flower of May (1953), one of her most experimental and misunderstood novels, to paid homage to Woolf's oeuvre.

The French Directory: Mirage of the Moderates

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Constitutional Regime ◽  
Opposite Extreme

This chapter details events following the end of the Terror and the political and emotional crisis of the Year II. The question that a great many Frenchmen put to themselves both in France and in the emigration, and a question to which observers throughout Europe and America awaited the answer, was whether some kind of moderate or constitutional regime would be durably established. The next four years showed that constitutional quietude was still far away. The difficulty was that not everyone agreed on what either moderation or justice should consist in. Justice, for some, required the punishment of all revolutionaries and their sympathizers. For others, it meant a continuing battle against kings, priests, aristocrats, and the comfortable middle classes. Both groups saw in “moderation” a mere tactic of the opposition, and moderates as the dupes of the opposite extreme. Compromise for them meant the surrender of principle. It meant truckling with an enemy that could never be trusted, and had no real intention of compromise.

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