The essays gathered in Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry survey the most remarkable playwriting career of Ireland’s foremost playwright – a career that now spans close to five decades...
     Over the past decade, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) published by the University of Debrecen in Hungary has commissioned several issues devoted to Irish Studies from a variety of perspectives: Irish Drama (1996), Myth and History in Twentieth-Century Irish Literature (2002), Irish Literature and Culture: Getting into Contact (2004). In 1999 Mária Kurdi, University of Pécs, guest-edited a Special Issue in Honour of Brian Friel at 70 and it is that issue which forms the core of this volume.
     Additional essays are from the other special HJEAS Irish Studies issues. Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry also includes an interview with Richard Pine about Friel’s work from another Hungarian scholarly journal, The AnaChronisT published by Eötvös Lóránt University in Budapest.
     To round out the collection, Etudes Irlandaises contributed an essay by a long-time friend of Irish Studies in Hungary, Christopher Murray.

From the Preface by Donald E. Morse

€23
ISBN 1-904505-17-1