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Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is rightly regarded as one of the
foremost Irish poets of this century, but he was also a
distinctive, gifted, and popular playwright. This unique selection
of eight of MacNeice's best-known plays, most of which were written
for BBC Radio, draws on the most authoritative texts to provide a
much-needed reminder of the power of his dramatic writing. All the
plays are published here in authentic versions for the first time,
several considerably changed, and two entirely new plays, never
before published. The volume comprises MacNeice's famous The Dark
Tower, published here for the first time in its third and final
version; the saga play They Met on Good Friday and the parable The
Mad Islands, both of which use explicitly Irish subject-matter; the
stage play One for the Grave, which mercilessly satirizes
television and commercialism; the epic Christopher Columbus; He Had
a Date (in its second version), an experiment in radio biography;
Prisoner's Progress, a prize-winning parable about an escape from a
prisoner-of-war camp; and MacNeice's last play, Persons from
Porlock, which traces the nemesis of an artist and was broadcast
just four days before MacNeice's own death. This generous and
representative selection makes available again MacNeice's
entertaining and innovative Irish blend of fantasy and realism,
prose and verse, and offers important new perspectives on
MacNeice's poetry.
This is the second of two collections of MacNeice's prose writings,
prepared by Alan Heuser. The first, concentrating on his literary
criticism, came out in 1987 (still available from OUP). The present
collection will be of interest to a wider readership, since it
covers the sweep of MacNeice's many ardently-pursued interests
outside the strictly literary: philosophy and travel, history,
autobiography, Ireland (the country of his birth, and one of the
mainsprings of his writing of both prose and poetry), India, Greece
- and rugby football. The volume also contains the `London
letters', written during the Blitz; and a previously unpublished
piece: Northern Ireland and her People. These writings convey the
visual perceptiveness, humour, seriousness, and enthusiasm of
MacNeice's personality and poetry: they are more than simply
reflections of the decades in which they were written (from the
thirties to the early sixties), revealing MacNeice's particular
gifts as a writer, and throwing light on his personality and
preoccupations. The complete bibliography of the shorter prose,
included in Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, is
repeated here; and there is annotation and an index. This title
also appears in the Oxford General Books catalogue for Autumn 1990.
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