Saint Oscar - Tapa dura

Terry Eagleton's plays in this first collection of his work for the theatre - "St Oscar", "The White", "The Gold and the Gangrene", "Disappearances", and "God's Locusts" - transgress what he terms 'the jealously patrolled frontiers between 'art' and 'idea". In spirit they owe at least as much to Oscar Wilde, the Irish Oxfordian socialist and proto-deconstructionist, as, for example in their use of prose and ballad forms, they do to Bertolt Brecht. Eagleton sees in Wilde's work 'a kind of secret compact' between artistic and theoretical experiment. A similar compact emerges in these startling dramas of (post)colonial Ireland and, in "Disappearances", the neo-colonial 'third' world, mixing commitment, passion and satirical wit, savage and playful, in a manner characteristic of Eagleton's later critical writing. "Saint Oscar", "About Oscar Wilde", and "The White", "The Gold and the Gangrene", based on the life and tragic death of James Connolly, originally toured Ireland respectively in productions by Field Day of Derry and Dubbeljoint of Belfast. "God's Locusts", written to commemorate the Great Famine and broadcast on "BBC Radio 3", castigates British officialdom for its callous inhumanity in mismanaging the relief operation.

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His The Illusions of Postmodernism appeared from Blackwell in 1996, as did the Second Edition of his classic Literary Theory: An Introduction and Marxist Literary Theory, co-edited with Drew Milne. The Eagleton Reader, edited by Stephen Regan, is forthcoming from Blackwell. Eagleton's numerous other works include Heathcliff and The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), William Shakespeare (1986), Walter Benjamin (1976), Criticism and Ideology (1976), and Marxism and Literary Theory (1976).