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189327

Dancing and Remembering: A Contextual Reading of Brian Friel’s Play Dancing at Lughnasa

Article

Last updated: 03 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

العلوم الإنسانية

Abstract

In Brian Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), the Irish playwright describes the last joyful moments in the lives of five unmarried Irish sisters who live together in a poor cottage in the fictional small town of Ballybeg in North Ireland. The retrospective tale that is narrated by the adult Michael, who is also the illegitimate son of Chris –one of the five sisters- portrays the forces that led to the collapse of the family in the 1936 summer during the Lughnasa festival celebrations. The hybrid form of drama and storytelling is Brian Friel's device to escape mega narrative and focus on the stories of individuals and small families. This de-familiarization of traditional literary conventions enables him to surrender grand history to personal stories. Furthermore, Friel is experimenting with the memory play form as he believes that man's memory anamnesis should not be trusted as factual. Furthermore, dance also plays a significant role in the play where almost every character dances at a certain point, but it is how every character involves in the act of dancing that illuminates him/her to the theatergoers. Indeed, dancing in the play is a release that connotes unfulfilled desires and hopes that cannot be expressed in words. In short, Brian Friel is the playwright who most probably defines Ireland to the outside world through analyzing the complexities of Irish culture

DOI

10.21608/jssa.2021.77264.1264

Keywords

Irish drama, dancing, memory, Catholicism

Authors

First Name

Mohsen

Last Name

Abbas

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

جامعة حلوان_-قسم اللغة الإنجليزية-کلية الاداب

Email

mkabbaszm@gmail.com

City

Cairo

Orcid

-

Volume

22

Article Issue

3

Related Issue

26207

Issue Date

2021-04-01

Receive Date

2021-05-23

Publish Date

2021-04-01

Page Start

177

Page End

211

Print ISSN

2356-8321

Online ISSN

2356-833X

Link

https://jssa.journals.ekb.eg/article_189327.html

Detail API

https://jssa.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=189327

Order

6

Type

المقالة الأصلية

Type Code

653

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة البحث العلمي في الآداب

Publication Link

https://jssa.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

Dancing and Remembering: A Contextual Reading of Brian Friel’s Play Dancing at Lughnasa

Details

Type

Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023