In Tragedy and Irish Writing McDonald considers the culture of suffering, loss, and guilt in the work of Synge, O'Casey, and Beckett. He applies external ideas of tragedy to the three dramatists and also discerns particular sorts of tragedy within their own work. While alert to the real differences among the three, the book also traces common themes and preoccupations. It identifies a conflict between form and content, between heightened language and debased reality, as the hallmark of Irish tragedy.

About the Author(s)

Ronan McDonald

Ronan McDonald is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Reading.

Table of Contents

Beckett Reads the Eighteenth Century * "Hiatus in MS": Swift and Beckett * Beckett and the Eighteenth-Century Novel * "Gentle Skimmer": Reader Entrapment in Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Beckett * Beckett's Literary Gerontophilia * "My Johnson Fantasy" * Pope, Beckett, and the Aesthetics of Decay