Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. "British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial Metaphor in Heaney, Friel, and McGuinness." PMLA 111, No. 2 (March 1996): 222-39.

Contends that Translations "evokes the binaries of Carthage and Rome to indict the British destruction of Gaelic culture."

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: A Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1988, 229 p.

Examines Friel's work within the context of "two dichotomies of place," representing divisions within Ireland that correspond to thematic divisions within his oeuvre.

Jent, William. "Supranational Civics: Poverty and the Politics of Representation in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City."

Argues against reducing the conflicts in The Freedom of the City to simple oppositions between socio-political forces.

Kearney, Richard. "Friel and the Politics of Language Play." The Massachusetts Review XXVIII, No. 3 (Autumn 1987): 510-15.

Maintains that while some of Friel's plays "do indeed have a political content," they are ultimately "profoundly anti-propagandistic."

Levin, Milton. "Brian Friel: An Introduction." Éire/Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies VII, No. 2 (1972): 132-36.

A review of the published versions of Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme that offers an overview of Friel's career to date.

Maxwell, D. E. S. Brian Friel. Lewisburg, Perm.: Bucknell University Press, 1973, 112 p.

Full-length study of Friel's plays and short stories. Includes a chronology of key dates in the author's life as well as a selected bibliography.

McGrath, F. C. "Language, Myth and History in the Later Plays of Brian Friel." Contemporary Literature 30, No. 4 (Winter 1989): 534-45.

Focuses on Friel's concern with "the images and myths that have shaped the national consciousness" of Northern Ireland, "especially those that have helped form the prejudices that divide the country today."

Murray, Christopher. "Brian Friel's Making History and the Problem of Historical Accuracy." In The Crows behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama, ed. Geert Lernout, pp. 61-77. Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1991.

Analyzes the significance of Friel's deliberate departures from historical fact in Making History.

Niel, Ruth. "Non-realistic Techniques in the Plays of Brian Friel: The Debt to International Drama." In Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Volume 2: Comparison and Impact, ed. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, pp. 349-59. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987.

Traces the influence of "modern international drama" on Friel's plays, asserting: "The prevalent themes of twentieth-century literature (lack of communication, loss of belief in a definable reality, alienation from self) figure prominently in his work."

O'Brien, George. Brian Friel. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989, 148 p.

Biographical and critical study of the author. Includes a chronology and primary and secondary bibliographies.

Peacock, Alan J., ed. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1992, 267 p.

A collection of essays on Friel that includes studies by Elmer Andrews, Seamus Deane, and others.

Pine, Richard. Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama. London: Routledge, 1990, 260 p.

Maintains that in his body of work Friel "has plotted a course through the minefield not only of language but of personality, discrepancy, and mendacity, which creates the alternating theatre of hope and despair."

——. "Yeats, Friel and the Politics of Failure." Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies X (1992): 154-71.

Asserts that "Brian Friel's work is a testimony—sometimes vicious, always eloquent, always enabling—to that culture of failure which supervenes all others, because it encompasses and causes them. it is greater than political failure, social failure, economic failure, cultural failure, because it is a failure of the will, an entropy. It is a deep knowledge of the emptiness at the heart of human experience."

Smith, Robert S. "The Hermeneutic Motion in Brian Friel's Translations." Modern Drama XXXIV, No. 3 (September 1991): 392-409.

Gauges the impact of George Steiner's After Babel on Friel's composition of Translations.

Throne, Marilyn. "The Disintegration of Authority: A Study of the Fathers in Five Plays of Brian Friel." Colby Library Quarterly XXIV, No. 3 (September 1988): 162-72.

Investigation of the male parents in Friel's dramas, arguing that a "combination in the fathers of a power or authority, which is sometimes crippling to their children, and an impotence in solving the problems of life in general and of Ireland in particular creates conflicts with and within those children."

Upton, Carole-Anne. "Visions of the Sightless in Friel's Molly Sweeney and Synge's The Well of the Saints. Modern Drama XL, No. 3 (Fall 1997): 347-58.

Uncovers similarities between the two plays, noting: "The action of the plot in both cases consists of the central figure(s) being "miraculously" cured of physical blindness, and subsequently rejecting this so-called gift of sight to finish up in a kind of exile-"

Verstraete, Ginette. "Brian Friel's Drama and the Limits of Language." In History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, pp. 85-96. Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 1988.

Attempts to demonstrate that "underneath the apparently colourful speeches of Friel's characters the dramatist voices an incisive scepticism about the possibilities of the linguistic medium."

Additional coverage of Friel's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale Research: Contemporary Authors, Revised Edition, Vols. 21-24; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vol. 33; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 42, 59; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 13; Major Twentieth-Century Writers.