Irish Drama and Coming of Age in the Periphery

Presents the first full-length study of the Irish Bildungsdrama, or coming-of-age play, to advance a portable theory of genre evolution

• Constructs a genealogy of the Irish Bildungsdrama, or coming-of-age play
• Contains close readings of over twenty canonical and lesser-known Irish plays from the early twentieth century to the present
• Examines the mutual influence of literary, historical, political, economic, and cultural discourses of development in Ireland
• Reassesses the centrality of the novel and Bildungsroman in world literary history
• Advances a portable new theory of genre evolution and literary development in the global periphery

The most fully realised coming-of-age narratives in modern Ireland emerge not in the familiar genre of the Bildungsroman but in drama. Irish Drama and Coming of Age in the Periphery argues that this apparent anomaly should be understood as an innovative response to the conceptual incompatibility of Enlightenment developmental models within the global periphery. Writers in twentieth and twenty-first-century Ireland turn to drama to fulfill the narrative arc of human maturation amid colonial and postcolonial conditions inimical to the pursuit of private and collective destiny encapsulated in the philosophical concept of Bildung and the genre of the Bildungsroman. By wielding the temporal and spatial compression of the stage, Irish dramatists produce affirmative depictions of development rarely matched by their novelist counterparts. Drawing lessons from the Irish Bildungsdrama, this book advances a portable theory of genre evolution that challenges unidirectional and novel-oriented models of world literary influence and innovation.