Playing the Hero: Reading the Táin Bó Cúailnge

by Ann Dooley

In Playing the Hero, Ann Dooley examines the surviving manuscript versions of the greatest of the early Irish sagas, the Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle-Raid of Cooley), and creates a picture of the cultural conditions and literary mind-sets under which medieval scribes recreated the text. Dooley argues that the scribes' work is both a transmission and a translation, and that their own changing historical circumstances within the space of one hundred years, from the beginning to the end of the twelfth century, determines the specifics of their literary creativity.

Playing the Hero is a unique example of more contemporary literary methodologies - post-structuralist, feminist, historicist and beyond - being used to illuminate the Irish saga world. Dooley provides a commentary for the saga, helping to re-animate its literary sophistication. Her work is an interrogation of both the Irish epic hero - a reading of the male through the medium of feminine discourse - and the process whereby violence as normalized in the saga genre can be recovered as problematic and troubling. Dooley's work is groundbreaking and will provoke a wide response in Medieval Irish studies.

250 pages, Hardcover

First published November 27, 2005

Reviews

[Maya]

I don’t feel like rating this is something that I can do. Please read my review at Celtic Scholar’s Reviews and Opinion

[M F]

well I understood about half of that. partly because manuscripts etc that I don't really understand but mostly because Dooley is a wee bit too fond of complicated academic language and sentences that last five lines