Stage Irish - Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation: Irish Studies in Europe. / Fagan, Paul (Editor); Radak, Tamara (Editor); Fuchs, Dieter (Editor). Trier: WVT, 2021. (Irish Studies in Europe).
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.
"Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation provides readers with a sweeping look at Stage Irishness that covers an enormous range in time, space, and genre. While all readers will undoubtedly find value in the introduction, the rest of the book provides a wonderful à lacarte menu for readers to choose from based on their particular area of research, and with most essays coming in at around fifteen pages, readers will likely pick more than a few delectable treats from outside their field. Scholars of drama, film, literature, and history will all find enriching and engaging pieces on the Stage Irish in this wonderful update to a perennial theme."
Julian Breandán Dean, Irish Studies Review 30.2 (2022)
Dieter Fuchs is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Department of English and American Studies of the University of Vienna and the Head of the Vienna Centre for Irish Studies. His main research areas include Shakespeare and early modern studies; James Joyce and high modernism; Irish studies; the campus novel.
