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Menzies examines how Beckett appropriates the bicycle – from a larger European literary community where it is a symbol of freedom and escape – to a distinctly Irish cycle of idealism and disappointment. Effortless and joyful freedom of movement, as bicycles provide on the European continent, leads to accidents that prevent Beckett’s Irish characters from escaping their socio-cultural malaise. Through such insights, Menzies provides a new lens for reading the many, many Irish modernist tales involving bicycles (Beckett’s, O’Brien’s and Bowen’s) as a symbol of exile, independence, the desire to escape the Irish milieu, and its inevitable failure.

Franks analyses Warner’s politicisation of characters in her film adaption of Bowen’s novel, for example, the treatment of the character Peter contrasts starkly with Bowen’s intense Anglo-Irish sympathy.
Warner’s work is illustrating the change in the socio-political interpretation of the IRA. This is an increasingly sympathetic and balanced interpretation which shows the influence of the 1997 peace agreement on Irish art more generally, m...