Reading Brendan Behan

Reading Brendan Behan is the first volume in 20 years to focus on Behan's rich and eclectic body of creative works - his poetry and plays in Irish and English, his short stories and his extraordinary autobiographical novel, Borstal Boy. It explores how Behan sought to identify the proper role for the post-independence Irish writer in a country where clerical and political policing and rigid censorship laws allowed little room for artistic manoeuvre.

This volume will set the context in which Behan's works will be read into the future and firmly locate him as a major player in late modernism. While engaging in much close reading, the essays employ a variety of recent critical approaches. Among them include cultural studies, theatre studies, translation and comparative studies, Post-Colonial theory, Queer theory, and reception studies. Reading Brendan Behan will reinvigorate scholarly interest and renew critical appraisal of one of Ireland's funniest, trickiest, and, at the same time, most serious experimental writers.