Critical Analysis Of Juno And The Paycock

The debate of social relevance of art concerns on whether the work of art should or should not be oriented towards fulfilling objectives deemed non-literary. Committed literature is not done for its own sake but to pursue a political, social, religious, or ideological goal. Since this study deals with social consciousness, social and economic problems I shall rely on the Marxist literary theory. Marxist literary theory is a materialistic approach to analyzing and interpreting literary texts. “Marxists believe that any theory which treats literature in isolation, and keeps it in isolation from society and history should be in effective. This is an attempt to show what literature is, this came against the idea of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’” . It mainly

The author shows the true cost of war on the poor working class and how war, poverty, and the worsening life conditions affected them. The play expresses O’Casey’s frustration and anger at the marginalization of the working class by middle class conservatives in Ireland's revolution.

The author sets the play in the Dublin slums, in a tenement. Juno and the Paycock takes place around 1922 in the aftermath of the 1921 Settlement and the midst of the Civil War. A degree of Irish independence had been won, but at the cost of splitting Ireland into the Free State and the six northern counties. The play is an immediate response to utterly contemporary events, reflecting a period of huge political and social upheaval in Ireland. In addition to these political factors, Ireland, like so much of the industrialized world, was in deep economic depression. This resulted in unemployment, social deprivation and a crisis of confidence in the existing social and economic structures — the whole of society in ‘a terrible state o’

For Ngugi the everyday life is an interesting topic of study and observation. Patrick Williams read Ngugi’s works “as an increasingly politically committed anatomizing of the troubled development of twentieth-century Kenya” Critics continue to find “such visionary moments
[in his writings] aesthetically unconvincing or politically naïve” Williams adds that “Ngugi is perhaps the paradigmatic postcolonial intellectual: politically committed, oppositional, outspoken, activist, and exiled. At the same time, though this fact is widely acknowledged, it is, arguably, surprisingly little studied.”

Ngugi shows in I Will Marry When I Want the betrayal of the aspirations of the masses of people in Kenya by the post independence African leadership, Contrary to the people’s expectations. After Kenya’s independence from British rule, people thought that the land would be restored to the indigenous righteous owners. Independence seemed only to