from Part VI - Critical Understandings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2025
This chapter examines O’Casey’s plays in the context of Irish historical revisionism, examining whether the cynicism towards nationalism that O’Casey expressed in the 1920s can really be seen as an example of revisionism avant la lettre. The chapter situates O’Casey’s views in relation to the work of Father Francis Shaw and R. F. Foster, and looks at the critique of O’Casey offered in 1926 by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. But the chapter argues that O’Casey was not seeking to evaluate the historical record in a dispassionate way. Rather, O’Casey sought to endorse a class-conscious socialist republic, and to show in his drama the way that the existing class system might use and abuse individual capability.
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