"Victory" recounts a catalogue of heroes and heroines, from Roland and
Cuchulain to Helen and Iseult, finally arriving at the mythical phoenix.
With Patrick Bixby, he has edited Standish O'Grady's
Cuchulain: A Critical Edition, and they are currently coediting A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge University Press).
He planned another sequel which would focus on the hero
Cuchulain, but never finished that novel.
Yeats'
Cuchulain Cycle of Plays, adapt: Lorella Loftus; dir: Karen Jambon.
(5) This "dying hero" is the statue of Irish mythological hero,
Cuchulain, at the General Post Office in Dublin.
(56) The Courting of Emer, in
Cuchulain of Muirthemne.
Lisa Gee and
Cuchulain Brian found nine-month-old Preston dead in his cot with ties from the popular padding wrapped twice round his neck.
Tales of the Irish hero
Cuchulain were, like the Sovereignty myth, employed by Revivalists to promote native masculinity in the midst of imperialism.
"
Cuchulain was nothing if not a guide to action." (47) R.
Important too are the stories from other nations: the Christian Bible, but also tales such as Robin Hood, Pocahontas, Sinbad or
Cuchulain the Hound of Ulster and those myriads of supernatural beings, superheroes and heroic women that have been garnered from the world's mythologies.
It is both important and utterly unimportant that Beckett is Irish." (8) Donoghue goes on to analyze Beckett's use of language and his place within a dwindling Irish Literary Revival in terms of the examination of Oliver Sheppard's bronze statue of
Cuchulain in Dublin's GPO--a conversation between Wylie and the CG, one reminiscent (for this reviewer) of that among Welsh officer Fluellyn and-the Scots, the Irish, and the English soldiers in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2--and reminiscent, too, of another appreciation of a naked statue, that by Leopold Bloom in the National Museum.