Criticism

A great deal of my critical writing has been lost through computer hard drive crashes and floppy disc corruption in the past 11 years, sadly. I have managed to recover a couple of pieces and they are included below. The rest of what I’ve uploaded here is some of what I have written on my own, in my study since graduate school, as I have delved more deeply into Irish literature and explored my own interests in folklore and mythology. I’m attempting to retype some of my other pieces from graduate school that I have hard copies of in files, but that will be an on-going process.

Deirdre: Beyond the Politics Into Poetry and Myth – Examines the role of Deirdre as symbol and woman in the plays of Yeats, Synge and AE.

Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan: Satire or Comedy? An Archetypal Inquiry – Closely looks at Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and applies Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism to it to decide whether it should be classified as comedy or satire.

William Monk: A Study of a Detective: Written for Detective Fiction class at VCU in the Spring of 1999, this is a critical look at Anne Perry’s William Monk novels.

Jim Thompson: Fiction or Life?: Also from the Detective Fiction class – examining the autobiographical elements in Jim Thompson’s works.