<b>"Poor Banished Children of Eve": Tom Murphy and the syntax of history</b><br>

Abstract

This essay engages with the work of playwright Tom Murphy and suggests that Murphy synthesizes the dialectic between past and present by representing history as a process of story-telling, where hegemonic Catholic bourgeois nationalist history is contradicted by repressed discourses of class and gender.   The aim is to move beyond a reading of Irish theatre grounded in identitarian paradigms of nation and nationalism, towards an engagement with ethical issues of class and gender subordination which are as much a part of Irish cultural politics as the nation is or ever was.