A detailed critical study of the leading Indian novelist in English and a key figure in the development of a distinctive postcolonial literature. This study covers all of Narayan's work, offering an accessible introduction to his life and fiction with detailed analyses of the major novels. Although the chapters take the reader through the successive phases of his career, they are organised on a thematic rather than a chronological basis to allow a focus on the most significant critical issues his work raises. So, while the introduction sketches the outline of his life, the first chapter...

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus . Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relations of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heoric endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic...

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic...

As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the...

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre provides the most comprehensive survey of the field to be found in a single volume. Drawing on more than 40 contributors from around the world, the book addresses a full range of topics relating to modern Irish theatre from the late nineteenth-century theatre to the most recent works of postdramatic devised theatre.
Ireland has long had an importance in the world of theatre out of all proportion to the size of the country and has been home to four Nobel Laureates (Yeats, Shaw, and Beckett, and Seamus Heaney, while primarily a poet, also...