by Stewart Parker
ed. Clare Wallace
ISBN 80-7308-240-6 (paperback). 580pp.
Publication date: October 2008
Price: € 16.00 (not including postage)
Order: paperback / Kindle / PDF
Stewart Parker ranks among Ireland’s most innovative dramatists and yet as the twentieth anniversary of his death approaches, critical engagement with his work has still much ground to cover. With the exception of The Actress and the Bishop (1976) and Kingdom Come(1977), Stewart Parker’s theatre plays have remained in print with Methuen. This is the only material that is currently widely available to scholars, students and readers. However, Parker’s work extends well beyond this known core including numerous journalistic writings, literary criticism, radio and television plays.
In honour of the twentieth anniversary of Stewart Parker’s death, Litteraria Pragensia Books is proud to announce the publication of a two volume set of Parker’s TV plays and journalistic writings with critical introductions. Both volumes provide unique and long overdue perspectives on Parker’s work in an accessible format aimed to extend critical acknowledgement of Parker’s status as one of the most versatile and engaging writers to emerge in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.
“As in the best of his stage work, so in the best of his TV plays, Parker was able to image human relationships in all their regenerative power, irrespective of the social and political specificity within which those relationships are set. This collection allows us to appreciate the whole range and ambition of dramas but also, and above all, they set the scene for moving Parker’s critical profile from a few pages to a full and informed critique of his total oeuvre.” –Shaun Richards, Irish Studies Review
STEWART PARKER: TELEVISION PLAYS, introduced by Clare Wallace (Charles University) includes the scripts and production details of six of Parker’s television plays: Lost Belongings; Radio Pictures; Blue Money; Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain; Joyce in June; I’m a Dreamer Montreal.
James Stewart Parker (20 October 1941 – 2 November 1988) was a Northern Irish poet and playwright. His plays include Spokesong (1975), a musical Kingdom Come (1977), Catchpenny Twist (1977), Nightshade (1979), Pratt’s Fall(1981), Northern Star (1984), Heavenly Bodies (1986) and Pentecost (1987).
Litteraria Pragensia 