Brian Arkins Livres

Exploring the themes of sex and love, this book examines a diverse range of poets from ancient Greece and Rome to the Troubadours of Provence, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, highlighting their reflections on the complexities of desire. It also addresses the works of Shelley and Byron regarding incest, alongside modern Irish writers like Eavan Boland, John Montagu, and Desmond Egan. This comprehensive analysis serves as a significant contribution to the history of ideas, revealing how these poets grappled with the tyranny of sexual desire throughout the ages.

This book presents an analysis of more than 30 plays written by Irish dramatists and poets that are based on the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. These plays proceed from the time of Yeats and Synge through MacNeice and the Longfords on to many of today's leading writers.

This book analyses the relationship between Ancient Rome and Shakespeare across his histories, tragedies and comedies.

This book aims to provide a comprehensive, but succinct analysis of the tragedies and comedies written by Greek and Roman dramatists. The book is comprehensive in the ways it deals not just with Greek tragedy of the fifth century BCE, but also with Seneca's tragedies of the first century CE. The book also deals with two types of Greek comedy: the comedy of ideas in Aristophanes, and the later social comedy of Menander, this being appropriated in Rome by the comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. The tragedies and comedies of fifth century Athens do not endorse the official ideology of the city. They raise questions about the position of women, the never ending war with Sparta, the nature of religious belief. Crucial here is the depiction by Euripides and by Sophocles of powerful women characters, female intruders who disrupt the male world: Medea, Antigone, Electra, Lysistrata. Comic drama usually concludes on a positive note: with marriage, with plenty of food and drink.

This study focuses on the ideas of W. B. Yeats and explores his thinking on a wide range of fundamental subjects. Since opposites are central to Yeats’s thought, the book begins with an analysis of this topic. The author then examines Yeats’s views on religion, sex and politics, again scrutinising the opposites at play. The author considers Yeats’s adherence to various anti-empirical belief systems and the transformation of his view of sex as largely a romantic concern to his later more ‘earthy’ perspective. Yeats’s fundamentally Tory political inclinations are examined alongside his regrettable espousal of eugenics. In the second part of the book Yeats’s view of history and of human character in A Vision are analysed. The author discusses Yeats’s two versions of ‘Sophocles’ and his poems on Byzantium. The final chapter on Yeats’s style stresses the pervasive use of embedded phrases and of terminal questions in the poems.