[audiobook] The Knight of the Burning Pestle (New Mermaids) by Francis Beaumont at Arts-Photography

Description

Christopher Murrayrsquo;s definitive study of Seaacute;n Orsquo;Casey; the last great writer of the Irish literary revival; provides a strong interpretative context for his life.Murray looks afresh at the Dublin of the 1880s and 1890s in order to provide an authoritative background to Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s childhood. He pays particular attention to the political situation from 1880 to 1922; setting it against Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s own treatment in his autobiographies in an attempt to establish lsquo;Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s Irelandrsquo;. But Orsquo;Casey was an international as well as a national figure: half his life was spent away from Ireland and his annual income came mainly from the USA. Murray considers Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s career up to the controversial premiere of The Plough and the Stars in 1926 in the light of W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory and their dream of a national theatre. Thereafter he interprets it in a much wider; equally contentious; international context; chronicling his subsequent projects; which included The Silver Tassie and his Marxist play The Star Turns Red.Murray establishes Orsquo;Casey as a self-made man of letters; an irrepressible fighter; a man who combined political courage and innocence; an individual torn between a humanist vision of life rooted in his Dublin childhood and a utopian but blinkered loyalty to the Soviet Union. Murray contends that while much of Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s work was uneven; flawed and overambitious; at its best it was infused with a passion and generosity that place it among the best bodies of drama in the twentieth century. Rich in original material; Murrayrsquo;s biography reconstructs a life committed to the act of writing as a moral endeavour. There was something profoundly religious in Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s psyche; which was at war with the communism he embraced; just as there was something profoundly romantic in a sensibility that retained the image of his first love throughout his years in exile. He was a man of many contradictions; a complex; combative public figure and yet a warm and intimate family man. If Seaacute;n Orsquo;Caseyrsquo;s life was in the end a failure; it was a noble one which reveals that; to quote a Jacobean playwright he admired; lsquo;Integrity of life is famersquo;s best friendrsquo;. That integrity shines through in this biography more brightly and engagingly than ever before.Seaacute;n Orsquo;Casey; Writer at Work: Table of ContentsPreconception(s)PART 1 First ThingsBeginningsSeeing Thingslsquo;Give Me That Old Style Religion!rsquo;lsquo;To Make Eternal Silence Speakrsquo;Under Which Flag?PART 2 The Dublin PlaysLove Among the RuinsGoing Through the MillTelling It Like It Islsquo;I Banish You!rsquo;PART 3 London ndash; New York ndash; LondonLondon Lights and The Silver TassieTrapped Inside the Gates?lsquo;Beside the Golden Doorrsquo;PART 4 Toughing It Out In DevonOrsquo;Caseyrsquo;s Good WarOak Leaves and LavenderCock-a-Doodle DandyThe Road to TorquayPART 5 Last ThingsThe Writerrsquo;s Not for BurningA Death in the FamilyThe Drums of Archbishop McQuaidSomething of a RenaissanceTalking to GodAfterlife