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SOURCE: "The Romanticism of Brian Friel," in Contemporary Irish Writing, edited by James D. Brophy and Raymond J. Porter, Iona College Press, 1983, pp. 127-40.
In the following essay, Leary examines the themes of "life and death, exile and home, being and loss, " which recur throughout Friel's work.
Some day when I'm awf'ly low,
When the world is cold,
I will feel a glow just thinking of you
And the way you look tonight.
The Kern-Fields song runs throughout Brian Friel's Faith Healer (1979) and resonates in all his earlier stories and plays. Friel is part of the romantic tradition, a sour variety that foresees little for man, but one that treasures early memories as visions to be drawn upon in later, bleaker years and views authority in its various forms-—familial, religious, civil—as the destroyer of that vision.
Citing that Fields verse may be misleading. The vision in...
This section contains 6,629 words (approx. 23 pages at 300 words per page) |
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