Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedies
by Marianne McDonald, J. Michael Walton

Irish playwrights have often returned to the world of Greek myth, in recent years more than ever.

Drama in Ireland is still a means of exploring the issues of family and state; of gender, class and race; of the oppressors and the oppressed.

It is political in the broad sense in which the Greeks understood the word, involving everyone--immediate and concentrated through parallel and parable.

This collection of provocative essays reveals how some of the great Irish poets and dramatists of the past and present have drawn on Greek myths, which have travelled across three thousand years, to bring new insights on the world in which we now live.

"Amid Our Troubles" examines the work of such writers as Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Brendan Kennelly, Frank McGuinness and W.B.

Yeats, and includes new essays from, amongst others, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin.