Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama

Russell contextualizes Friel's plays using epistemology, phenomenology, and ecocriticism (though not exclusively) to point out the practical and processual bases for accounts of the social, the subject, and the environment, with the focus on background, bodies, and their performance, explored through a modernist lens. [...]the notion of belonging is built into the structure of the book, approached thematically and aimed at identifying the central elements of Friel's precarious boundaries between home and exile, located in some sense of place, despite modernity's vexing attempts to obliterate it. [...]the author insists that place, which must be considered in flux in Friel's work, brings together the peripheral and/or figures of exclusion on the same plane as the reader and audience, creating a heterogeneous community.