John Byrne's The Slab Boys: Technicolored Hellhole in a Town Called Malice
Name
John Byrnes The Slab Boys.pdf
Size
428.67 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
868c0887e7142a3f38539e6e53a7cdb3
Author(s)
Donaldson, William
Date Issued
December 2015
Journal
Studies in Scottish Literature
Publisher
University of South Carolina Press
Citation
Donaldson, William (2015) "John Byrne's The Slab Boys: Technicolored Hell-hole in a Town Called Malice," Studies in Scottish Literature: Vol. 41: Iss. 1, 221–236.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Presents a detailed discussion and appreciation of the Slab Boys tetralogy, a sequence of four plays by the Scottish playwright and painter John Byrne, beginning with The Slab Boys (1978), focused on a group of apprentices in the color-mixing room of a Paisley carpet-factory in the 1950s, and then tracing the divergence of their lives through three later plays, The Loveliest Night of the Year (1979, later titled Cuttin' A Rug), Still Life (1982), and Nova Scotia (2008); examines Byrne's characterization, "excoriatingly destructive wit," and "rambunctiously demotic language"; analyzes the tetralogy's continuing major themes of the relation between art and life, high art and popular culture; and concludes that these are plays of "striking intellectual breadth" and "superb verbal inventiveness," combining "international with distinctively Scottish themes," and "producing a fusion of realism and fantasy probably unmatched in Scotland since the heyday of Hugh MacDiarmid."
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Humanities. Literature Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol41/iss1/18
