Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is the first book to examine the plays of five fascinating
and creative women placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel
tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day. How these
playwrights dramatize violence and its impacts in political social and personal life is a
central concern of this book. Augusta Gregory Eva Gore-Booth Dorothy Macardle Mary Manning
and Teresa Deevy re-model theatrical form re-structuring action and narrative and exploring
closure as a way of disrupting audience expectation. Their plays create stage spaces and images
that expose relationships of power and authority and invite the audience to see the
performance not as illusion but as framed by the conventions and limits of theatrical
representation. Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is suitable for courses in Irish theatre
women in theatre gender and performance dramaturgy and Irish drama in the twentieth century
as well as for those interested in women's work in theatre and in Irish theatre in the
twentieth century.
