Irish Studies, Syracuse University Press
Series · 82
books · 1970-2023
Books in series
#1
Joyce and the Joyceans
2002
Covers a variety of subjects, including a unique series of essays describing some pivotal events in the international study of Joyce, including the beginnings of the Joyce Foundation and Symposia.
#2
Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance
Second Edition
1970
W. B. Yeats was the outstanding figure in the early years of the Irish Literary Renaissance. This study offers the fullest, most detailed picture available of Yeats' impact on that movement between 1885 and 1899 and sheds new light upon the development of the movement itself.
For this new edition, Professor Marcus has added an introductory essay surveying work in the field since the original publication of the study and offering important new interpretive material of his own.
#3
Pilgrimage in Ireland
The Monuments and the People
1991
Book by Harbison, Peter
#4
Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival
A Changeling Art
1987
This is a critical survey of the fiction and non-fiction written in Ireland during the key years between 1880 and 1920, or what has become known as the Irish Literary Renaissance. The book considers both the prose and the social and cultural forces working through it.
#5
Double Visions
Women and Men in Modern and Contemporary Irish Fiction
1999
In this book, James M. Cahalan examines gender issues in the writings and in the lives of a dozen notable Irish authors and their fictional characters. Covering literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, he seeks to close the gender gap in Irish literary history by pairing similar works of fiction by both men and women. The author addresses, for instance, how women writers' characterizations of men compare with men's representations of women. Sensitive to other distinctions such as class and region, Cahalan reveals differences in perceptions of shared subjects—such as politic and autobiography—to illuminate a series of "double visions." Contents include readings of the Aran Islands narratives of Emily Lawle s and Liam O'Flaherty; the comic fictions and serious careers of Somerville and Ross and James Joyce; the coming-of-age novels of Edna O'Brien and John McGahern and Brian Moore; and "Troubles" novels by four authors—Jennifer Johnston and Bernard MacLaver ty, and Julia O'Faolain and William Trevor. The book's introduction is a far-ranging critique of feminist criticism and gender issues in Irish cultural history, while the conclusion touches on several other recent Irish novels and films.
#6
The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790
2021
With characteristic lawlessness and connection to the common man, the figure of the rogue commanded the world of Irish fiction from 1660 to 1790. During this period of development for the Irish novel, this archetypal figure appears over and over again. Early Irish fiction combined the picaresque genre, focusing on a cunning, witty trickster or pícaro, with the escapades of real and notorious criminals. On the one hand, such rogue tales exemplified the English stereotypes of an unruly Ireland, but on the other, they also personified Irish patriotism. Existing between the dual publishing spheres of London and Dublin, the rogue narrative explored the complexities of Anglo-Irish relations. In this volume, Lines investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. Alongside recognized works of Irish fiction, such as those by William Chaigneau, Richard Head, and Charles Johnston, Lines presents lesser-known and even anonymous popular texts. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogues themselves, marked by persistence and adaptability, and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.
#7
Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
2013
Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friels Drama shows how the leading Irish playwright explores a series of dynamic physical and intellectual environments, charting the impact of modernity on rural culture and on the imagined communities he strives to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.
#8
Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press
1784–1963
2020
From the Revolutionary War forward, Irish immigrants have contributed significantly to the construction of the American Republic. Scholars have documented their experiences and explored their social, political, and cultural lives in countless books. Offering a fresh perspective, this volume traces the rich history of the Irish American diaspora press, uncovering the ways in which a lively print culture forged significant cultural, political, and even economic bonds between the Irish living in America and the Irish living in Ireland.
As the only mass medium prior to the advent of radio, newspapers served to foster a sense of identity and a means of acculturation for those seeking to establish themselves in the land of opportunity. Irish American newspapers provided information about what was happening back home in Ireland as well as news about the events that were occurring within the local migrant community. They framed national events through Irish American eyes and explained the significance of what was happening to newly arrived immigrants who were unfamiliar with American history or culture. They also played a central role in the social life of Irish migrants and provided the comfort that came from knowing that, though they may have been far from home, they were not alone.
Taking a long view through the prism of individual newspapers, editors, and journalists, the authors in this volume examine the emergence of the Irish American diaspora press and its profound contribution to the lives of Irish Americans over the course of the last two centuries.
#9
Guilt Rules All
Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction
2020
Irish crime fiction, long present on international bestseller lists, has been knocking on the door of the academy for a decade. With a wide range of scholars addressing some of the most essential Irish detective writing, Guilt Rules All confirms that this genre has arrived. The essays collected here connect their immediate subjects—contemporary Irish crime writers—to Irish culture, literature, and history. Anchored in both canonical and emerging themes, this collection draws on established Irish studies discussions while emphasizing what is new and distinct about Irish crime fiction. Guilt Rules All considers best-sellers like Adrian McKinty and Liz Nugent, as well as other significant writers whose work may fall outside of traditional notions of Irish literature or crime fiction. The essays consider a range of themes—among them globalization, women and violence, and the Troubles—across settings and time frames, allowing readers to trace the patterns that play a meaningful role in this developing genre.
#11
Fine Meshwork
Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature
2019
In a 1984 interview with longtime friend Edna O’Brien, Philip Roth describes her writing as “a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction.” The phrase “fine meshwork” can apply not only to O’Brien’s writing but also to the connective threads that bind her work to others’, including, most illuminatingly, Roth’s. Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Roth and O’Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In Fine Meshwork, Dan O’Brien investigates the shared concerns of these two authors, now regarded as literary icons in their home countries. He traces their fifty-year literary friendship and the striking parallels in their books and reception, bringing together what, at first glance, seem to be quite disparate the largely feminist and Irish scholarship on O’Brien with Jewish and American perspectives on Roth. In doing so, and in considering them in a transnational context, he argues that the intertwined nature of their writing symbolizes the far-ranging symbiosis between Irish literature and its American—particularly Jewish American—counterpart.
#12
Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism
2019
Since W. B. Yeats wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific bent of Irish literature has often been taken as a given. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism brings together leading and emerging scholars of Irish modernism to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change. The collection spotlights authors ranging from James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett to less-studied writers like Emily Lawless, John Eglinton, Denis Johnston, and Lennox Robinson. With chapters on naturalism, futurism, dynamite, gramophones, uncertainty, astronomy, automobiles, and more, this book showcases the far-reaching scope and complexity of Irish writers’ engagement with innovations in science and technology. Taken together, the fifteen original essays in Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism map a new literary landscape of Ireland in the twentieth century. By focusing on writers’ often-ignored interest in science and technology, this book uncovers shared concerns between revivalists, modernists, and late modernists that challenge us to rethink how we categorize and periodize Irish literature.
#13
George Moore and the Autogenous Self
The Autobiography and Fiction
1994
In the midst of an explosion of interest in the field of autobiography, there have developed critical languages and approaches that allow us to read both George Moore's fiction and his fictive autobiographies in new and exciting ways. Elizabeth Grubgeld presents a fresh look at the diverse experiments in fiction and the highly ironic and multi-generic performances Moore put forth as his life story. She focuses on the tension between Moore's fascination with deterministic theories of human behavior and his need to assert a principle of self-creation, his "autogenous self." Moore's work exhibits a profound recognition of the forces of heredity, gender, culture, and history while simultaneously declaring his belief in an autogenous self. In early novels like A Drama in Muslin and Esther Waters, there is a notable conflict between his postulation of the pure, instinctive individual and the emphasis upon the shaping power of heredity and economics inherent in the traditions of social realism that he adopts. In The Untilled Field, The Lake, and later works, Moore perfects a narrative technique that in highlighting the power of subjective memory, allows his characters to work out a new relation with the forces of history. Grubgeld's discussion of satire, caricature, and parody as autobiographical forms will contribute greatly to an understanding of how Moore viewed the relations between the self and the surrounding world. This study, which also incorporates a theoretical discussion of letters as autobiography, will be of interest to specialists in Irish studies, late Victorian and modern British literature, gender studies, and autobiography.
#15
Yeats and Postmodernism
1990
In the last twenty-five years, there has been a revolution in literary study in the English-speaking world involving two related shifts in understanding. One is the recognition that the study of literature requires a theoretical grounding, and the other is an acknowledgement that such a grounding is contingent upon the realization that ours is a postmodernist world. Despite much resistance from traditional literary historians and formalist critics, both of these assumptions influence many of today’s most forceful and insightful academic literary analyses. Yet, Yeats scholarship has remained largely embedded in traditional modes of critical theory. For the first time, this collection of original essays applies a wide spectrum of contemporary critical theories to major works in the Yeats canon, serving as models of how to read and work with Yeats from a postmodernist/poststructuralist perspective. R. B. Kershner, for example, uses Bakhtin and medical/psychological studies of dyslexia to consider the written versus the oral and the inner dialogization of Yeats’s writing; Cheryl Herr provides a juxtaposition of the major concepts of Foucault’s work, especially the notion of the episteme from The Order of Things as applied to Yeats’s Vision; and Ronald Schleifer considers the designing gestures of postmodern rhetoric found in Yeats, using the work of Lyotard, Jameson, O’Hara, and Derrida. These and other provocation essays, which challenge us to rethink out most basic notions of how to read Yeats, offer ample evidence of the remarkable new perceptions that can be gained from applying poststructuralist criticism to Yeats.
#16
Industrial Development and Irish National Identity, 1922-1939
2018
The roots of many problems facing Ireland's economy today can be traced to the first two decades following its independence. Opening previously unexplored areas of Irish history, this is the first comprehensive study of industrial development and attitudes coward industrialization during a pivotal period, from the founding of the Irish Free State to the Anglo-Irish Trade Treaty.
As one of the first postcolonial states of the 20th century, Ireland experienced strong tensions between the independence movement and the considerable institutional and economic inertia from the past. Daly explores these tensions and how Irish nationalism, Catholicism, and British political traditions influenced economic development. She thus sheds light on the evolution of economic and social attitudes in the newly independent state.
Drawing on a wide array of primary sources not yet generally accessible, Daly examines such topics as Irish economic thinking before independence; the conservative policies of W. T. Cosgrave's government in the first five years after independence; the growing division between the two major political parties over economic policy; Fianna Fail's controversial attempts to develop an independent - and nationalistic - economic policy; the largely unsuccessful attempt to develop native industries; the development of financial institutions; the political and social implications of economic change; the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement of 1938; and comparisons with other economically emerging nations.
#17
Irish Questions and Jewish Questions
Crossovers in Culture
2018
The Irish and the Jews are two of the classic outliers of modern Europe. Both struggled with their lack of formal political sovereignty in the nineteenth-century. Simultaneously European and not European, both endured a bifurcated status, perceived as racially inferior and yet also seen as a natural part of the European landscape. Both sought to deal with their subaltern status through nationalism; both had a tangled, ambiguous, and sometimes violent relationship with Britain and the British Empire; and both sought to revive ancient languages as part of their drive to create a new identity. The career of Irish politician Robert Briscoe and the travails of Leopold Bloom are just two examples of the delicate balancing of Irish and Jewish identities in the first half of the twentieth century. Irish Questions and Jewish Questions explores these shared histories, covering several centuries of the Jewish experience in Ireland, as well as events in Israel–Palestine and North America. The authors examine the leading figures of both national movements to reveal how each had an active interest in the successes, and failures, of the other. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars from the fields of Irish studies and Jewish studies, this volume captures the most recent scholarship on their comparative history with nuance and remarkable insight.
#18
The Rebels and Other Short Fiction
2018
An accomplished novelist, short story writer, and playwright, Richard Power (1928–1970) was most well–known for his 1969 novel The Hungry Grass . While many of his stories were published in the leading literary journals of the day, his premature death prevented his work from gaining the fame it deserved. Gathered together for the first time, Power’s subtle and poignant stories capture the daily lives of urban and rural dwellers in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Coming of age, the tensions between tradition and modernity, and romantic love are some of the themes in these beautifully vivid tales. Power explores the interiority of an Irish mother and the thorny navigation of an adolescent girl's coming of age with pathos and humor. This memorable collection, thoughtfully arranged and introduced by James MacKillop, gives new life to an undeservedly neglected writer for fans and scholars of the Irish short story tradition.
#23
Kate O'Brien and Spanish Literary Culture
2017
One of the most important Irish novelists of the twentieth century, Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) was also a pioneer of women’s writing. In a career that spanned almost fifty years, nine novels, nine plays, two travelogues, and copious criticism, O’Brien rebelled against the narrow nationalism and restrictive Catholicism prevalent in independent Ireland. In this highly original approach to O’Brien’s work, Davison traces the influence of three leading Spanish writers—Jacinto Benavente, Miguel de Cervantes, and Teresa of Avila. O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Spanish literature and culture offered an oblique way of resisting the Catholic and conservative imperatives of the Irish Free State. In a series of close comparative readings, Davison identifies the origin of O’Brien’s creative disinhibition and ultimately situates her within a tradition of dissident Irish women writers.
#25
Revolutionary Damnation
Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright
2017
In Irish fiction, the most famous example of the embrace of damnation in order to gain freedom—politically, religiously, and creatively—is Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. His “non serviam,” though, is not just the profound rebellion of one frustrated young man, but, as Brivic demonstrates in this sweeping account of twentieth-century Irish fiction, the emblematic and necessary standpoint for any artist wishing to envision something truly new. Revolutionary fervor is what allowed a country with a population lower than that of Connecticut to produce so many of the greatest writers of the twentiety century. Because Irish culture was largely dictated by the Catholic Church and its conservatism, the most ambitious Irish writers, like Joyce, Beckett, and the ten others Brivic presents here, saw the advantages of damnation and seized them, rejecting powerful norms of church, state, and culture, as well as of literary form, voice, and character, to produce some of the most radical work of the twentieth century. Brivic links the work of writers such as Flann O’Brien, Patrick McCabe, and Anne Enright to the theories of Alain Badiou. His mathematical procedure for distinguishing what is truly innovative informs the progressive political and philosophical thrust that these writers at their best carry on from Joyce and Beckett to unfold a fierce tradition that extends into the twenty-first century.
#26
Relocated Memories
The Great Famine in Irish and Diaspora Fiction, 1846-1870
2017
The Great Famine radically transformed Ireland; nearly one million people of the rural countryside died, and the eviction of farmers led to massive emigration. The Famine encouraged anti-English, nationalist sentiments, and this trauma is seen as pivotal in the development of an Irish anticolonial consciousness and in the identity formation of transatlantic Irish communities. In Relocated Memories, Corporaal challenges the persistent assumption that the first decades after the Great Irish Famine were marked by a pervasive silence on the catastrophe. Discussing works by well-known authors such as William Carleton and Anthony Trollope as well as more obscure texts by, among others, Dillon O’Brien and Susanna Meredith, Corporaal charts the reconfigurations of memory in fiction across generations and national borders.
#27
Political Acts
Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012
2016
Since the establishment of the Northern Irish state in 1921, theatre has often captured and reflected the political, social, and cultural changes that the North has experienced. From the mid–twentieth century, theatre has played a particularly important role in documenting women’s experiences and in showing how women’s social and political status has changed with the transformation of the state. Throughout the North’s history, women’s dramatic writing and performance have often contradicted mainstream narratives of the sectarian conflict, creating a rich and daring trove of counternarratives that contest the stories promoted by the government and media.Moving beyond the better-known women theatre practitioners of the North such as Marie Jones, Christina Reid, Anne Devlin, and the Charabanc Theatre Company, Coffey recovers the lost history of lesser-known, early playwrights and highlights a new generation of women writing during peacetime. She examines how Northern women have historically used the theatrical stage as aform of political activism when more traditional avenues were closed off to them. Tracing the development of women’s involvement in Northern theatre, Coffey ultimately illuminates how issues such as feminism, gender roles, violence, politics, and sectarianism have shifted over the past century as the North moves from conflict into a developing and fragile peace.
#28
Standish O'Grady's Cuculain
A Critical Edition
2016
Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O Grady published a three-volume "History of Ireland "that simultaneously recounted the heroic ancient past of the Irish people and helped to usher in a new era of cultural revival and political upheaval. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries, from W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory to Patrick Pearse. Despite the profound influence O Grady s writings had on literary and political culture in Ireland, they are not as well known as they should be, particularly in view of the increasingly global interest in Irish culture. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in" History of Ireland" the rise of the young warrior, his famous exploits in the "Tain Bo Cualinge "(The Cattle Raid of Cooley), and his heroic death. Castle and Bixby s edition also includes a scholarly introduction, biography, timeline, glossary, editorial notes, and critical essays, demonstrating the significance of O Grady s writing for the continued reimagining of Ireland s past, present, and future. Inviting a new generation of readers to encounter this work, the volume provides the tools necessary to appreciate both O Grady s enduring importance as a writer and Cuculain s continuing resonance as a cultural icon."
#29
Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker
A Study of the Prose
2016
Seamus Heaney’s unexpected death in August 2013 brought to completion his body of work, and scholars are only now coming to understand the full scale and importance of this extraordinary career. The Nobel Prize–winning poet, translator, and playwright from the North of Ireland is considered the most important Irish poet after Yeats and, at the time of his death, arguably the most famous living poet. For this reason, much of the scholarship to date on Heaney has understandably focused on his poetry. O’Brien’s new work, however, focuses on Heaney’s essays, book chapters, and lectures as it seeks to understand how Heaney explored the poet’s role in the world. By examining Heaney’s prose, O’Brien teases out a clearer understanding of Heaney’s sense of the function of poetry as an act of public intellectual and ethical inquiry. In doing so, O’Brien reads Heaney as an aesthetic thinker in the European tradition, considering him alongside Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, and Adorno. Studying Heaney within this theoretical and philosophical tradition sheds new and useful light on one of the greatest creative minds of the twentieth century.
#30
Israelites in Erin
Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival
2015
From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the story of the Israelites’ liberation from bondage in Egypt served as the archetypal narrative for the birth of the Irish nation. Exodus was critical to both colonial and anticolonial conceptions of Ireland and Irishness. Although the Irish–Israelite analogy has been cited often, a thorough exploration has never before been documented. Bender successfully fills this gap with Israelites in Erin . Drawing upon both canonical and little-known texts of the Literary Revival, including works by Joyce, plays by Lady Gregory, and political writings by Charles Stewart Parnell and Patrick Pearse, Bender highlights the centrality of Exodus in Ireland. In doing so, she recuperates the history of a liberation narrative that was occluded by the aesthetic of 1916, when the Christ story replaced Exodus as a model for revolution and liberation. In two concluding chapters, Bender deftly maps Exodus throughout Joyce’s Ulysses, revealing how the text plumbs the biblical narrative for its submersed but frank and unsettling story of ambivalent, impure, ironic origins. With extensive research and remarkable insight, Israelites in Erin inaugurates a compelling new critical conversation.
#33
Crossing Highbridge
A Memoir of Irish America
2001
The first in her family born in the United States, Maureen Waters grew up the "Bronx Irish" daughter of two unforgettable her storytelling, former revolutionary father, and her fierce, IRA-supporting mother. Crossing Highbridge is framed by the accidental death of Waters' son and her struggle to make sense of this loss by re-imagining her past and her heritage. Her life in postwar New York City was colored by Catholicism and strong cultural links to "the other side"—by Irish step dancing, the melodies of Thomas Moore, and the rituals, inflections, and harrowing memories impressed on her. Sex was a mystery. Schoolgirls wore below-the-knee blue serge uniforms with starched white collars and cuffs. Brutal treatment at the hands of the nuns who ran her college drove Waters to transfer to a secular school. Waters rebelled against an upbringing that seemed to wall her off from the twentieth century. She marr ed outside the church, divorced, and became a scholar and professor at the City University of New York. Waters follows in the tradition of her father with this vividly humorous and moving true tale.
#34
Compassionate Stranger
Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine
2014
The first biography of Asenath Nicholson, Compassionate Stranger recovers the largely forgotten history of an extraordinary woman. Trained as a school teacher, Nicholson was involved in the abolitionist, temperance, and diet reforms of the day before she left New York in 1844 “to personally investigate the condition of the Irish poor.” She walked alone throughout nearly every county in Ireland and reported on conditions in rural Ireland on the eve of the Great Irish Famine. She published Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger, an account of her travels in 1847. She returned to Ireland in December 1846 to do what she could to relieve famine suffering—first in Dublin and then in the winter of 1847–48 in the west of Ireland where the suffering was greatest. Nicholson’s precise, detailed diaries and correspondence reveal haunting insights into the desperation of victims of the Famine and the negligence and greed of those who added to the suffering. Her account of the Great Irish Famine, Annals of the Famine in Ireland in 1847, 1848 and 1849, is both a record of her work and an indictment of official policies toward the land, employment, famine relief. In addition to telling Nicholson’s story, from her early life in Vermont and upstate New York to her better-known work in Ireland, Murphy puts Nicholson’s own writings and other historical documents in conversation. This not only contextualizes Nicholson’s life and work, but it also supplements the impersonal official records with Nicholson’s more compassionate and impassioned accounts of the Irish poor.
#38
Irish Women Dramatists, 1908-2001
2014
Irish women dramatists have long faced an uphill challenge in getting the recognition and audience of their male counterparts. There are more female playwrights now than ever before, but they are often ignored by mainstream theatres. Kearney and Headrick strive to shift the spotlight with Irish Women Dramatists. The plays collected in this volume represent a cross-section of the excellent dramatic output of Irish women writing in the twentieth century. In addition to the scripts and biographical introductions, the anthology includes a detailed, critical, annotated essay addressing the development of the Irish theatre throughout this time period, and the place women have artistically carved out for themselves in a traditionally male-dominated theatre industry and dramatic canon.
One of the few collections of plays by Irish women, this volume contextualizes the political and sociological climate in which these playwrights developed. As theatre practitioners—actors and directors—as well as scholars, Kearney and Headrick have devoted years of research to discovering and rediscovering the contributions these women have made—and continue to make—in the Irish and world theatre scenes.
#44
Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism
2014
Ireland is a country which has come to be defined in part by an ideology which conflates nationalism with the land. From the Irish Revival’s celebration of the Irish peasant farmer as the ideal Irishman to the fierce history of land claim battles between the Irish and their colonizers, notions of the land have become particularly bound up with conceptions of what Ireland is and what it is to be Irish. In this book, Wright considers this fraught relationship between land and national identity in Irish literature. In doing so, she presents a new vision of the Irish national landscape as one that is vitally connected to larger geographical spheres. By exploring issues of globalization, international radicalism, trade routes, and the export of natural resources, Wright is at the cutting edge of modern global scholarly trends and concerns. In considering texts from the Romantic era such as Leslie’s Killarney, Edgeworth’s "Limerick Gloves," and Moore’s Irish Melodies, Wright undercuts the nationalist myth of a "people of the soil" using the very texts which helped to construct this myth. Reigniting the field of Irish Romanticism, Wright presents original readings which call into question politically motivated mythologies while energizing nationalist conceptions that reflect transnational networks and mobility.
#49
Other People's Diasporas
Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture
2013
With the economic rise of the "Celtic Tiger" in the 1990s, Irish culture was deeply impacted by a concurrent rise in immigration. A nation tending to see itself as a land of emigrants suddenly saw waves of newcomers. In this book, Moynihan takes as her central question a formulation by sociologist Steve Garner: "What happens when other people’s diasporas converge on the homeland of diasporic people?" Approaching the question from a cultural rather than a sociological vantage point, Moynihan delves into fiction, drama, comedy, and cinema since 1998 to examine the various representations of and insights into race relations.
"Other People’s Diasporas" draws upon the recent fiction of Joseph O’Connor, Roddy Doyle, and Emma Donoghue; films directed by Jim Sheridan and Eugene Brady; drama by Donal O’Kelly and Ronan Noone; and the comedy of Des Bishop to present a highly original and engaging exploration of contemporary Irish discourses on race.
#50
Gender and Medicine in Ireland
1700-1950
2012
The essays in this collection examine the intersections between gender, medicine, and conventional economic, political, and social histories in Ireland between 1700 and 1950. Gathering many of the top voices in Irish studies and the history of medicine, the editors cover a range of topics including midwifery, mental health, alcoholism, and infant mortality.
Composed of thirteen chapters, the volume includes James Kelly’s original analyses of eighteenth-century dental practice and midwifery, placing the Irish experience in an international context. Greta Jones, in an exploration of a disease that affected thousands in Ireland, explains the reasons for higher tuberculosis mortality among women. Several essays call attention to the attempted containment of disease, exploring the role of asylums and the gendered attitudes toward insanity and reform. Contributors highlight the often neglected impact of nurses and midwives, occupations traditionally dominated by women.
Presenting a social history of Irish medicine, the disparate essays are united by several common themes: the inherent danger of life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, the specific brutality of women’s lives at the time, and the heroics of several enlightened figures.
#51
Collaborative Dubliners
Joyce in Dialogue
2012
Enigmatic, vivid, and terse, James Joyce’s Dubliners continues both to puzzle and to compel its readers. This collection of essays by thirty contributors from seven countries presents a revolutionary view of Joyce’s technique and draws out its surprisingly contemporary implications by beginning with a single unusual premise: that meaning in Joyce’s fiction is a product of engaged interaction between two or more people. Meaning is not dispensed by the author; rather, it is actively negotiated between involved and curious readers through the medium of a shared text. Here, pairs of experts on Joyce’s work produce meaning beyond the text by arguing over it, challenging one another through it, and illuminating it with relevant facts about language, history, and culture. The result is not an authoritative interpretation of Joyce’s collection of stories but an animated set of dialogues about Dubliners designed to draw the reader into its lively discussions.
Contributors include: Derek Attridge, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Maud Ellmann, Anne Fogarty, Andrew Gibson, Carol Loeb Shloss, Joseph Valente
#52
Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace
2011
Samuel Beckett has long carried the aura of an artist "damned to fame." Known for being a recluse with a profound distaste for publicity, Beckett gained a legendary image, infusing much of the critical attention that his literary work continues to receive. In this highly original and audacious volume, Dilks sharply departs from existing accounts of Beckett’s persona by developing a critical analysis of his life as a professional writer. Focusing on the period between 1929 and 1969, and taking into account published and unpublished letters, advertising materials, photographic portraits, royalty statements, and other archival material, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace offers a powerful challenge to the received understanding of Beckett as an author shy of fame, averse to self-promotion, and unconcerned with commercial success.
Showing how Beckett’s assumptions about professional life were shaped by his socioeconomic upbringing in South Dublin, Dilks illustrates the author’s protracted efforts to develop and sustain a successful career as a professional writer with an enduring legacy. Dilks explores in great detail how Beckett fashioned an authorial persona, shaped public reception of his work, and controlled his business affairs. He shrewdly used agents and professional acquaintances to market himself as an unknown celebrity and to defend and disseminate his public image. Throughout, the book acknowledges Beckett’s self-consciousness about his mythic relationship with the literary marketplace.
#53
Modern Irish Drama
W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr, Second Edition
2010
Modern Irish Drama: W. B. Yeats to Marina Carr presents a thorough introduction to the recent history of one of the greatest dramatic and theatrical traditions in Western culture. Originally published in 1988, this updated edition provides extensive new material, charting the path of modern and contemporary Irish drama from its roots in the Celtic Revival to its flowering in world theater. The lives and careers of more than fifty modern Irish playwrights are discussed along with summaries of their major plays and recommendations for further reading.
Most significantly, Sternlicht treats the major themes of modern Irish drama: the struggle for independence; the suffering caused by extreme poverty and the resulting emigration; the decline of Anglo-Irish ascendency; the epic longing for and love of the land; the waning power of the clergy; generational conflicts; problems of the postcolonial transition; and the impact of feminism on a patriarchal society. Sternlicht brings well-deserved attention to such younger playwrights as Conor McPherson, Robert Massey, Ursala Rani Sarma, and Sean McLoughlin, among others. Including a selected bibliography and filmography, Modern Irish Drama is an indispensable resource for students of drama studies and production companies alike.
#55
Catholic Emancipations
Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce
2007
This groundbreaking book explores the role 19th century Irish Catholic authors played in forging the creation of modern Irish literature. As such it offers a unique tour of Ireland’s literary landscape, from early origins during the Catholic political resurgence of the 1820s to the transformative zenith wrought by James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Emer Nolan observes that contemporary Irish literature is steeped in the ambitions and internal conflicts of a previously captive Irish Catholic culture that came into its own with the narrative art form. He revisits, with keen insights, the prescient and influential songs, poems, and prose of Thomas Moore. He also points out that Moore’s wildly successful work helped create an audience for authors to come, i.e. John and Michael Banim, William Carleton and the popular novelists Gerald Griffin and Charles Kickham. An innovative aspect of this study is the author’s exploration of the relationship between James Joyce and Irish culture and his nineteenth-century Irish Catholic predecessors and their political and national passions. It is, in effect, a telling look at the future history of Irish fiction.
#56
Suburban Affiliations
Social Relations in the Greater Dublin Area
2010
Since the mid-1990s Ireland has experienced an extraordinary phase of economic and social development. Housing estates have mushroomed around towns and cities, most notably around the environs of Dublin. Seeking to understand the impact of these recent developments, Corcoron, Gray, and Peillon initiated the New Urban Living study, a detailed research project focused on four suburbs of Dublin. Suburban Affiliations represents the culmination of that research, offering an invaluable contribution to the study of suburbanization and to our understanding of the process of social change that has come to Ireland.
Challenging the mostly negative assessment that has been made of the suburban social fabric, the authors argue that residents of suburban estates are not disaffiliated; rather, they are connected with the place they live and with each other in many different ways. The book maps the nature, quality, and focus of these affiliations, analyzing the ways in which suburbs differ from one another. The authors consider whether the Irish suburbs exhibit indigenous or European qualities, or whether they are an extension of a globalizing American suburban frontier. Employing a case study approach, they provide rich insight into how those who live in the suburbs feel about their surroundings. At the same time, the book as a whole develops a universal narrative that coheres around the notion of suburban affiliations.
#59
Selected Plays
1986
A collection of four plays that span Colum’s career: The Land, The Betrayal, and two of his Noh plays, Glendalough and Monasterboice.
At the age of twenty-three, Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was one of the founding fathers of the Abbey Theatre. His contribution to the development of Irish drama continued until his voluntary exile to America in 1914. His play, Broken Soil (1903), was the first commercial success at the Abbey, and it established the long-lived tradition of the peasant play on the Irish stage. This collection comprises the three major forms of his dramatic art: The Land (1905); Betrayal (1912); and two of his five Noh plays (a five-play cycle containing poetry and prose following the Yeats and Japanese Model), Glendalough (based on the career of Charles Stewart Parnell), and Monasterboice (based on the early life of Colum’s lifelong friend, James Joyce).
#60
Irish Theater in America
Essays on Irish Theatrical Diaspora
2008
For over 150 years, Irish playwrights, beginning with Dion Boucicault, have been celebrated by American audiences. However, Irish theater as represented on the American stage is a selective version of the national drama, and the underlying causes for Irish dramatic success in America illuminate the cultural state of both countries at specific historical moments. Irish Theater in America is the first book devoted entirely to the long history of this transatlantic exchange. Born out of the conference of the Irish Theatrical Diaspora project, this collection gathers together leading American and Irish scholars, in addition to established theater critics. Contributors explore the history of Irish theater in America from Harrigan and Hart, through some of the greatest and most disappointing Irish tours of America, to the most contemporary productions of senior Irish playwrights such as Brian Friel and younger writers such as Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson. Covering the complexity of the relationship between Irish theater and the United States, this volume goes beyond the expected analysis of plays to include examinations of company dynamics, analysis of audience reception, and reviews of production history of individual works. Contents Mick Moloney, “Harrigan, Hart, and Irish-America and the Birth of the American Musical” Nicholas Grene, “Faith Healer in New York and Dublin” Lucy McDiarmid, “The Abbey, Its ‘Helpers,’ and the Field of Cultural Production in 1913” Christina Hunt Mahony, “’The Irish Play’: Beyond the Generic”
#61
The Myth of an Irish Cinema
Approaching Irish-Themed Films
2008
For the past seventy years the discipline of film studies has widely invoked the term national cinema. Such a concept suggests a unified identity with distinct cultural narratives. As the current debate over the meaning of nation and nationalism has made thoughtful readers question the term, its application to the field of film studies has become the subject of recent interrogation. In The Myth of an Irish Cinema, Michael Patrick Gillespie presents a groundbreaking challenge to the traditional view of filmmaking, contesting the existence of an Irish national cinema. Given the social, economic, and cultural complexity of contemporary Irish identity, Gillespie argues, filmmakers can no longer present Irishness as a monolithic entity. The book is arranged thematically, with chapters exploring cinematic representation of the middle class, urban life, rural life, religion, and politics. Offering close readings of Irish-themed films, Gillespie identifies a variety of interpretative approaches based on the diverse elements that define national character. Covering a wide range of films, from John Ford’s The Quiet Man and Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned Devine to Bob Quinn’s controversial Budawanny and The Bishop’s Story, The Myth of an Irish Cinema signals a paradigm shift in the field of film studies and promises to reinvigorate dialogue on the subject of national cinema.
#62
Joyce, Imperialism, and Postcolonialism
2008
On the surface, James Joyce's work is largely apolitical. Through most of the twentieth century he was the proud embodiment of the rootless intellectual. However, perspectives on the colonial history of Ireland have proliferated in recent years, yielding a subtle and complex conception of the Irish postcolonial experience that has become a major theme in current Joyce scholarship. Highly original and often provocative, these essays bring Joyce powerfully within the ambit of postcolonial studies. Contributors include
Allan Simmons
Eugene O'Brien
Jon Hegglund
Trevor Williams
William Mottolese
Michael Tratner
Christy Burns
#63
Irish Orientalism
A Literary and Intellectual History
2004
British writers from Cambrensis to Spenser depicted Ireland as a remote border land inhabited by wild descendants of Asian Scythiansbarbarians to the ancient Greeks. Contemporaneous Irish writers likewise borrowed classical traditions, imagining the Orient as an ancient homeland. Lennon traces Irish Orientalism through origin legends, philology, antiquarianism, historiography into Irish literature and culture, exploring the works of Keating, O'Flaherty, Swift, Vallancey, Sheridan, Moore, Croker, Owenson, Mangan, de Vere, and others. He explores a key moment of Irish Orientalism, the twentieth-century Celtic Revival, discussing the works of Gregory, Casement, Connolly, and Joyce, but focusing on Theosophist writers W.B. Yeats, George Russell, James Stephens, and James Cousins.
#64
Of Irish Descent
Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging
2008
What does it mean to be of Irish descent? What does Irish descent stand for in Ireland? In Northern Ireland? In the United States? How are the categories of “native” and “settler” and accounts of ethnic origin being refigured through popular genealogy and population genetics? Of Irish Descent addresses these questions by exploring the contemporary significance of ideas about ancestral roots, origins, and connections. Moving from the intimacy of family stories and reunions to disputed state policies on noble titles and new applications of genetic research, Nash traces the place of ancestry in interconnected geographies of identity—familial, ethnic, national, and diasporic. Underlying these different practices and narratives are potent and profoundly political questions about who counts as Irish and to whom Ireland belongs. Examining tensions between ideas of plurality and commonality, difference and connection that run through the culture and science of ancestral origins, Of Irish Descent is an original and timely exploration of new configurations of nation and diaspora as communities of shared descent.
#66
Party Pieces
Oral Storytelling and Social Performance in Joyce and Beckett
2007
“Irishness” has often meant self-dramatization because Ireland is commonly represented, and has historically represented itself, as a nation of storytellers, musicians, and virtuoso performers. Like many of their characters, Joyce and Beckett were superb musicians, creators of performance, and they sought both to evoke and exhaust the resources and rhythms of language and performance. In this groundbreaking work, Alan Warren Friedman explores the rich historical and literary backgrounds of this distinctly Irish phenomenon. He then explains its cultural significance and discusses the major works of both authors, illustrating the diverse ways in which Ireland is enacted. Party Pieces offers a distinct contribution to the critical study of Joyce and Beckett. Unlike other books on the subject of social performance, it places two great modern Irish writers within social and metaphorical conventions that are specifically moored in their Irishness. In so doing the author shows how social performances not only impacted the works of Joyce and Beckett but also were central to their creative processes. Meticulously researched, convincingly argued, and clearly written, Party Pieces is an ideal reference for scholars of Joyce, Beckett, and Irish studies.
#67
Trapped in Thought
A Study of the Beckettian Mentality
2007
Eric P. Levy’s book investigates the mentality or attitude of cognitive apprehension expressed in Beckettian texts. Primary areas of concern include how the Beckettian attitude began, what concepts it invents or transforms to sustain its mode of thought, how the mentality wards off factors which would refute or heal it, and, most paradoxical of all, why this mentality ultimately reduces the mind to an estranged source of thought, continuously repudiated by its own awareness. The study uncovers the strategies by which experience is evacuated of all content but that consistent with the attitude registering it.
#68
Selected Short Stories
1985
Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was in the forefront of the Irish Literary Revival along with William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, AE (George Russell), and John Millington Synge. At the age of twenty-three he was a founding father of the Abbey Players, and he was recognized as one of the most talented young writers of drama, poetry, and short fiction. Unfortunately, Colum quarreled with Yeats and Lady Gregory, and, since he could not earn a living in Dublin by writing alone, he left for America. Colum's contribution to Irish letters is unique, because he alone of the early giants of the Irish Literary Revival was Roman Catholic, peasant born, and country bred. His literary themes are tributes to the indomitable Irish spirit, the natural nobility of the Irish peasant, the ancient folk customs of the countryside, and the poetic beauty of Irish English.
#70
Ireland and the Global Question
2006
Ireland has been rated the number one place to live because it successfully combines the most desirable elements of a modern society—the world’s fourth highest GDP per person and low unemployment—with the preservation of certain cozy elements of the old, such as stable family and community life. Michael J. O‘Sullivan presents the globalization of Ireland in a context of international trends in economics, international relations, and politics. His multi-disciplinary approach uncovers many of the weaknesses that lie behind the complacent and clichéd view of the Celtic Tiger. In examining Ireland’s great leap forward from a developing to a postindustrial economy, O‘Sullivan offers valuable lessons to other countries.
#74
Two Irelands
Literary Feminisms North and South
2005
The very different histories of the North and South are reflected in their literature. While women in the Republic of Ireland have tended to write about social issuessexism, crime, unemployment, and domestic violencewomen in Northern Ireland focused on their society's historical tension and primarily nationalist and unionist politics. However, Pelan maintains that feminist ideology has provided contemporary Irish women with an alternate political stance that incorporates gender and nationality/ethnicity and allows them to move beyond the usual binaries of politics, history, and languageIrish and English. In an analysis enriched by a sophisticated but accessible engagement with contemporary feminist and gender theory, Pelan concludes that Irish women's writing, whether at the community or mainstream levelNorth or Southconsistently articulates political issues of direct relevance to the lives of Irish women today. As a result, such work retains close links with the initial impetus of the second wave of feminism as a political movement and questions the legitimacy of long-standing social, religious, and political conventions. From within the framework provided by this second wave, argues Pelan, Irish women can critique certain masculine ideologiesnationalist, unionist, imperialist, and capitalistwithout forfeiting their own sense of gender and national or ethnic identity. The book's significance lies in its placement of women's writing in the center of contemporary political discourse in Ireland and in ensuring that the writing from this periodmuch of it long out of printcontinues to exist as sociological as well as literary records. It will be of interest to a general and scholarly audience, especially those in the fields of contemporary Irish writing, feminism, and literary history.
#75
Joyce and Reality
The Empirical Strikes Back
2004
"Joyce was a realist, but his reality was not ours," writes John Gordon in his new book. Here, he maintains that the shifting styles and techniques of Joyce's works is a function of two interacting realities the external reality of a particular time and place and the internal reality of a character's mental state. In making this case Gordon offers up a number of new readings: how Stephen Dedalus conceives and composes his villanelle; why the Dubliners story about Little Chandler is titled "A Little Cloud"; why Gerty MacDowell suddenly appears and disappears; what is happening when Leopold Bloom stares for two minutes on end at a beer bottle's label; why the triangle etched at the center of Finnegans Wake doubles itself and grows a pair of circles; why the next to last chapter of Ulysses has, by far, the book's highest incidence of the letter C; and who is the man in the macintosh.
Gordon, whose authoritative "Finnegans Wake" A Plot Summary received critical acclaim and is considered one of the standard references, revisesand challengesthe received version of that reality. For instance, Joyce features ghost visitations, telepathy, and other paranormal phenomena not as "flights into fantasy" but because he believed in the real possibility of such occurrences.
#76
John Redmond and Irish Unity, 1912-1918
2004
In his treatment of Redmond, Joseph P. Finnan demonstrates the multiple identities of the Irish Parliamentary Party as nationalist, liberal, and Catholic. He looks at Home Rule as part of a federal solution to the Irish question within the United Kingdom, the reasons for the failure of Redmond's war policies, and the collapse of the Irish Parliamentary Party as part of the wider phenomenon of the decline of liberalism during the Great War. As he looks at Irish nationalism in its worldwide context, Finnan also shows how Redmond's handling of organizational problems in America sets the pattern for his later handling of similar problems in Ireland.
#77
Irish Women Writers Speak Out
Voices from the Field
2003
Bringing together the diverse and marvelously articulate voices of women of Irish and Irish-American descent, editors Caitriona Moloney and Helen Thompson examine the complicated maps of experience that the women's public, private, and literary lives represent—particularly as they engage in both feminism and postcolonialism. Acknowledging Mary Robinson's revised view of Irish identity—now global rather than local—this work recognizes the importance of identity as a site of mobility. The pieces reveal how complex the terms "feminism" and "postcolonialism" are; they examine how the individual writers see their identities constructed and/or mediated by sexuality. In addition, the book traces common themes of female agency, violence, generational conflicts, migration, emigration, religion, and politics to name a few. As it represents the next wave of Irish women writers, this book offers fresh insight into the work of emerging and established authors and will appeal to a new generation of readers.
#78
Yeats and the Visual Arts
1986
This beautifully illustrated book traces W. B. Yeats' fascination with the visual arts from his early years, which were strongly influenced by his father's paintings and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, to his celebration in his old age of Greek sculpture, Byzantine mosaics, and Michaelangelo's art.
#79
Women Creating Women
Contemporary Irish Women Poets
1995
Women Creating Women is a pioneering exploration of contemporary Irish women poets that should provide a frame of reference for all future discussion of this topic. Patricia Haberstroh focuses on five poets in particular, beginning with Eithne Strong and Nuala Nf Dhomhnaill, both of whom still write in the Irish language—each emphasizing the importance of the female perspective on the human experience. She then turns her attention to three of the best-known contemporary Eavan Boland, the most highly esteemed; Medbh McGuckian, the most difficult and original; and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, whose poems make some of the stronger statements about the need to balance a male with a female perspective to broaden the human vision. Drawing on a wide reading of the poets' works and extensive personal interviews with them, Haberstroh demonstrates the emergence of a more self-conscious and self-confident female poet who is ready to rewrite the story of Irish women and redefine and explore female identity and the image of women in Irish history, culture, and literature. Her final chapter explores Irish women's poetry since 1980. This book is a celebration of poets, poetry, and Ireland that allows the reader to discover the works of these fine poets.
#80
My Self, My Muse
Irish Women Poets Reflect on Life and Art
2001
A unique look into the minds and creative processes of contemporary Irish women poets, this book focuses on the transformation of their life experiences into poetry that blends personal identity with national identiry. It assembles many voices around common themes that are emerging to change Irish poetry permanently. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, whose book Women Creating Contemporary Irish Women Poets was a Choice Outstanding Academic book in 1996, shows in this new work how nine of the most prolific Irish women writers generate their poetry, broadening our understanding of the context of the poems. She pairs each author's verse with a companion (and often autobiographical) prose piece to illuminate the ways in which the poetry expresses the poet's personal experience. As women in a politically and religiously charged, male-dominated genre and country, these poets feel compelled to transcend daily life by articulating against the "norm." In this book, they describe the issues they confronted in their growth as poets and the strategies they developed to translate life into art. In linking these poets—drawn from Northern Ireland and England as well as the Republic of Ireland—Haberstroh throws into relief the characteristics that define their unique, individual subjects, themes, and styles.
#81
T. C. Murray, Dramatist
Voice of Rural Ireland
2002
Drawing on the archives of libraries in Dublin, New York City, and Boston, Albert J. DeGiacomo assesses T. C. Murray's contribution to the Irish dramatic movement. One of "the Cork realists" of the Abbey Theatre, Murray wrote seventeen plays in one, two, or three acts. A prominent National Teacher and a seemingly apolitical playwright in the Irish Literary Revival, Murray expressed nationalistic aspirations in his peasant tragedies. His characters' drive for self-determination and their religious consciousness mark Murray's dramatic landscape.
#82
Joyce and the City
The Significance of Place
2002
The essays in this collection confront the notion of urban space in the writings of James Joyce from several different critical points of metaphors of space and how they affect the reading of Joyce, the city itself in Dubliners, and the connection between space and language and subject matter in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.
#83
Reading William Kennedy
2001
A favorite of library and community reading groups, William Kennedy is best known for his novels Ironweed and his most recent, The Flaming Corsage . This eminently readable book provides a helpful introduction to students and others interested in his work. With engaging candor, Michael Patrick Gillespie provides a keen analysis of Kennedy's best-known works, a firm base for interpretation, and a better understanding of the cultural world that shapes the characters and informs the plots of Kennedy's novels. Rather than prescribing what one should see when reading Kennedy's works, the book moves to the next stage of exploring diverse responses to Kennedy's canon, broadening the reader's awareness of the range of alternative strategies and perspective. Gillespie begins with an introduction that outlines the imaginative context for Kennedy's work. Subsequent chapters, in three parts, provide extended treatments of his early work, key elements in the first three Albany novels, and finally the maturity of his overall fiction, including his new play, Grand View .
#84
Prodigal Father
1979
This work is a portrait of the life of the elder Yeats and his family, showing that J.B. Yeats was as worthy of his sons as they were of their father.
#85
Yeats and Artistic Power
1991
The first book to consider William Butler Yeats' aesthetic of artistic power, demonstrating the centrality in his work—from his earliest essay to the great poems and plays of his last years—of the concept that art shapes life. Drawing on the Irish bardic tradition as well as such figures as Shelley, Blake, and Wilde, Yeats developed a stance that enabled him to reconcile the exacting demands of literary craftsmanship, his interest in occult thought, and his desire to advance the cause of Irish nationalism. For this edition, new material has been added, connecting the argument of the original book to recent developments in theory and adding a Jungian perspective.
#86
Reading Roddy Doyle
2001
Roddy Doyle is one of the most popular Irish writers at work today. His book Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize, and The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van have all been made into feature films. In this first critical look at his oeuvre, Caramine White explores Doyle's innovative use of language; his employment of humor to further his characters' development and manipulate his audience; the role, however slight, that religion and politics play in his writing; and Doyle's overall social vision as projected in each book and as part of a complete body of work. Prominent aspects of each novel are brought to light, for instance, the function of music in The Commitments ; the importance of humor to diffuse tension in The Snapper ; the growing realism and deeper character development in The Van ; the use of double writing in Paddy Clarke ; and the symbolic significance of Paula's life as a metaphor for the abuses women suffer in a patriarchal society in The Woman Who Walked into Doors . White also discusses his recent novel, the critically acclaimed A Star Called Henry . She completes the volume with a transcription of an extensive interview with the author that reveals many facets of Doyle's life reflected in his writing.
#87
Ireland's National Theaters
Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement
2001
In the annals of Irish studies and theater history much has been written about the Abbey Theatre. Now, Mary Trotter not only sheds new Light on that company's history but also examines other groups with a range of political, religious, gender, and class perspectives that consciously used performance to promote ideas about nationalism and culture in Ireland at the turn of the last century. This innovative, interdisciplinary work details how different nationalist organizations with diverse political and artistic goals employed theater as an anticolonial tool. In Dublin's turbulent cultural and political arena during the first decades of the twentieth century, nationalist audiences read popular Irish melodramas in subversive ways; the Daughters of Erin staged tableaux of great women heroes; and the Abbey players earned both acclaim and apprehension within the nationalist community. Here is a compelling analysis of these and other groups' prominent role in Irish nationalism in the years before Easter 1916, and the way these political theaters gave birth to modern Irish drama.
#88
Twentieth Century Irish Drama
Mirror up to Nation
1997
The Irish Dramatic Movement gave to the world major playwrights such as Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O'Casey and Beckett, while in more recent times the international stage has come to appreciate the talents of a new generation of irish playwrights, from Brian Field to sebastian Barry and Marina Carr. In addition, since 1969, the drama of Northern Ireland, on and off the stage, has claimed world-wide attention. Preoccupied with questions of identity and national self-realisation, it was only after the achievement of independence in 1922 that the theatre assumed a more critical, analytic and demythologising role in society. It retained, however, the notion of a dynamic, of a system of beliefs open to wider possibilities than the established ideology fostered and controlled, keeping alive the idea of cultural revolt and renewal. Thus Irish drama owes its imaginative power to both its energetic involvement with the cultural transformations, as well as to more acceptable modes of representation and critique. This volume provides a perfect overview of a nation's theatre read in the light of a nation's self-definition. Mediating between history and its troubled relation with politics and art, the book attempts to do justice to the enabling and mirroring preoccupations of Irish drama.
#91
Brian Friel's (Post)Colonial Drama
Language, Illusion, and Politics
1999
Brian Friel is Ireland's most important living playwright, and this book places him in the new canon of postcolonial writers. Drawing on the theory and techniques of the major postcolonial critics, F. C. McGrath offers fresh interpretations of Friel's texts and of his place in the tradition of linguistic idealism in Irish literature.
This idealism has dominated Ireland's still incomplete emergence from its colonial past. It appeals to Irish writers like Friel who, following in a line from Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey, challenge British
culture with antirealistic, antimirnetic devices to create alternative worlds, histories, and new identities to escape stereotypes imposed by the colonizers.
Friel grew up in Northern Ireland's Catholic minority and now lives in the Irish Republic. McGrath maintains that all Friel's work is marked by colonial and postcolonial structures. Like his predecessor Wilde, Friel mixes lies, facts, memories, and individual perception to create new myths and elevates blarney to a realm of aesthetic and philosophical distinction.
An important, accessible, scholarly introduction, this book illustrates how Friel playfully subverts the English language and transcends British influence. Friel's reality is constructed from personal fiction, and it is his liberating response to oppression.
#92
Zulu
An Irish Journey
1998
Examines the social changes of generations of Irish immigrants and the relatives they leave behind, concentrating on the people of Roscrea, a small town in central Ireland, where the author's grandmother lived before immigrating to New York City in 1912.
#93
Contemporary Irish Cinema from The Quiet Man to Dancing at Lughnasa
1999
At a time when national cinemas in France and Japan have been marginalized on world screens, movies from and about Ireland have attracted huge audiences and captured top international prizes (The Crying Game), including an Academy Award (My Left Foot).
In Contemporary Irish Cinema, James MacKillop takes a variety of approaches in the treatment of films and film makers. Essayists, like Harlan Kennedy, John Hill, Martin McLoon, and Brian Mcilroy, represent leading journalists and critics; other contributors include young scholars well grounded in current cinematic and literary theory.
The authors probe cinema's rewriting of Irish history, from the controversial Michael Collins and In the Name of the Father to playwright Stewart Parker's overlooked miniseries on Ulster sectarianism, Lost Belongings. Jim Loter brings the writings of Martin Heidegger to bear on Cathal Black's dark comedy, Pigs. Attitudes toward the institutional church are revealed in Pamela Dolan's analysis of Playboys.
#94
A Yeats Dictionary
Persons and Places in the Poetry of William Butler Yeats
1998
This is the first dictionary to identify, chart, and explain in context the many proper names and place names that so famously enrich the poetry of William Butler Yeats and, just as famously, anchor that poetry to Ireland. In compiling this work, Lester I. Conner has relied upon Yeats' own prose, the principal Yeats criticism, and the writings of Yeats' friends and critics. The result is a work that warmly ushers us into the poems, where we find we are not strangers after all.
#95
The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House
1998
This volume is a comprehensive study of the ascendancy novel from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) through contemporary reinventions of the form. Kreilkamp argues that Irish fiction needs to be rescued from the critical assumptions underlying attacks on the historical mythologies of Yeats and the Literary Revival.
#96
Textures of Irish America
1992
The "textures" of the Irish-American experience have been manifold, greatly influencing this country's economic, social, and cultural development over the past two centuries. Unlike that of many other European immigrants, the Irish journey to America was viewed largely as a one-way trip. They quickly adjusted to America, soon becoming citizens and active participants in politics. By the end of the 19th century, they dominated not only most American cities but also sports, especially baseball, and many were prominent in show business. In this entertaining study of one of America's most engaging and controversial groups, Lawrence McCaffrey reveals how the Irish adapted to urban life, progressing from unskilled working class to solid middle class. Denied power and influence in business and commerce, they achieved both through politics and the Catholic church. In addition to politicians and churchmen, McCaffrey discusses the roles of writers such as Finley Peter Dunne, James T. Farrell, Eugene O'Neill, J.F. Powers, Edwin O'Connor, William Kennedy, Elizabeth Cullinan, Tom Flanagan, Thomas Fleming, Jimmy Breslin, and John Gregory Dunne, as well as such film stars as Jimmy Cagney, Bing Crosby. Grace and Gene Kelly, and Spencer Tracy. McCaffrey completes the story with a look at the role of Irish nationalism in developing the personality of Irish America and in liberating Ireland from British colonialism. The result of some forty years of thinking and writing about Irish-American life, McCaffrey's Textures will appeal to scholars and general readers alike and may very well becomes the standard work on Irish America.
#97
Irish Poetry After Joyce
1985
Like New
#98
New Plays from the Abbey Theatre 1993-1995
1996
Five new plays published for the first time from Ireland's distinguished theatre.
#100
Flann O'Brien, Bakhtin, and Menippean Satire
1995
This work applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of literary discourse and the concept of carnivalisation to the work of Flann O'Brien. The author emphasizes the political and social implications of the writings, arguing that O'Brien maintained a reflexive focus on language throughout his career.
#102
The Economy of Ulysses
Making Both Ends Meet
1995
This original and wide-ranging study explores the "economies" of Ulysses using a number of different critical and theoretical methods. Not only do the economic circumstances of the characters
form a significant part of the novel's realistic subject matter but the relationships between characters are also based upon modes of economic exchange. Moreover, the narrative itself is filled with economic terms that serve as tropes for its themes, events, and techniques. Some of the subjects and topics covered include Joyce's own "spendthrift" background, gift exchanges and reciprocity as a fundamental means of reader/author relationship in the novel, money and language, Bloom as an "economic man," the "narrative economy" of "Wandering Rocks," the relationship between commerce and eroticism, the function of sacrifice in the creation of value, counterfeiting, forgery, and other crimes of writing, and a demonstration of how the
encounter between Stephen and Bloom "makes both ends meet." The book brings together not only the opposed economic impulses in Joyce but also the conflicting strains of regulation and excess in the novel's structural economy.
#103
The Whole Matter
The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella
1995
This is the first comprehensive study of the works of one of lreland's most significant contemporary poets. Thomas Kinsella, who first became well known in Ireland in the 1950s, now ranks among the most important of his generation of Irish poets. Although he is considered by many to be the most serious and the most experimental of the contemporary Irish poets, his work has received little critical attention. Kinsella is often credited with bringing the techniques of international modernism to Irish verse. Jackson presents a rounded critique of the later poems, whose art engages, analyses and morally restructures the content of the poet's world. What emerges from The Whole Matter is a picture of Kinsella's astonishingly far-reaching evolution, culminating in an art deeply engaged with the culture around it and with the entire human predicament.
#104
Family Secrets
William Butler Yeats and His Relatives
1995
One of the world's leading Yeats scholars completes his definitive history, begun with the highly acclaimed Prodigal Father, in Family Secrets, a biography of William Butler Yeats, his younger brother Jack, and sisters Susan Mary (Lily) and Elizabeth Corbet (Lollie). This long-awaited sequel follows in the earlier book's tradition of the "right book written by exactly the right man" (Hugh Kenner). Never before has the public been privy to the story of these lives woven in such intimate detail. Murphy takes us into some of the family's darkest "secrets: " the strains of emotional instability among the Pollexfen aunts and uncles; interest in mysticism and the occult (about which Yeats wrote considerably); the father's long platonic relationship with Miss Rosa Butt; the tensions between Lily and Lollie (the "weird sisters"), and Lollie's difficult, even paranoid personality. Drawing on correspondence and an extensive number of unpublished letters and materials not hitherto available and more than one hundred photographs and illustrations (many never before published), Family Secrets explores a gallery of characters not often found within the confines of a single family. Their story, which reads like a novel, will not only capture the fancy of general readers but will make a significant contribution to the letters of twentieth-century literature.
#106
The Harp Re-strung
The United Irishmen and the Rise of Irish Literary Nationalism
1994
Mary Helen Thuente pushes the clock back, some fifty years, as she demonstrates in The Harp Re-strung that Irish literary nationalism actually began in the 1790s, with the United Irish movement, rather than in the 1840s, as has been generally accepted. The United Irish movement began as a club of paramilitary reformers in Belfast in 1791. Influenced by the French Revolution and related movements, these sons of the Enlightenment became ever more radical. Within five or six years, what had been a small club of intellectuals and political agitators resulted in a mass movement that was committed to overthrowing British rule in Ireland. By reevaluating the writings associated with the United Irish movement, especially the works of Thomas Moore and the Young Ireland writers, their context within the culture, and their impact on subsequent Irish nationalistic writing, Thuente establishes that the movement played a pivotal role in the development of Irish literary nationalism. She provides a rich balance in her treatment of elite and popular cultures, salvages information previously ignored by critics, and invites readers to look anew at the history and propaganda of the movement.
#107
The Anti-Modernism of Joyce's a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
1987
"Enter these enchanted woods ye who dare," is the famous, dictum from Sean O'Faolain about Portrait. As with all of Joyce's works, Portrait rewards its readers, over and over again, with its inexhaustible richness. It is a most enveloping and enchanting book, and Weldon Thornton's latest exploration of its world makes a major contribution to Joyce scholarship. Thornton takes a fresh look at important psychological and cultural issues in the novel, arguing that although it may be a classic text of literary modernism, it' is a fundamentally antimodernist work. The novel reflects a distance between Joyce and Stephen not simply in its tone or in certain differences between author and character but in its very structure and verbal texture. Thornton's comprehensive and thoughtful book provides readers with a new cultural critique and intellectual history of Portrait, which promises to become one of the major discussions of the novel.
#108
Reading Dubliners Again
A Lacanian Perspective
1993
Standard approaches to James Joyce's Dubliners usually emphasise Joyce's mastery of realism as well as his tight control of tone, character and detail. Most readings of these stories - whether in formal criticism or in classroom discussion - usually result in a celebration of the completeness of Joyce's work, the sense of how everything fits together with such seeming inevitability.
#109
Seamus Heaney
Poet of Contrary Progressions
1991
An assessment of Heaney's poetry and prose, tracing his "contrary progressions" through phases of affirmation and despair. Hart explores Heaney's work from the 1960s to "The Haw Lantern", seeking in the poems those elements and traits that Heaney allusively indicates in his prose.
#110
The Parnell Split, 1890-91
1992
Foreword by Conor Cruise O’Brien. The crisis and tragedy which followed the naming of Charles Stewart Parnell as correspondent in a divorce decree in 1890 remains one of the most significant events in modern Irish politics. In this powerful reassessment of the split, Frank Callanan reargues the politics of Parnell’s last campaign, and establishes the critical importance of T. M. Healy’s ferocious attacks on the Irish leader for the consolidation of a conservative and reactionary Irish nationalism. Contemporary and previously unexplored sources – newspapers, periodicals, political speeches and price correspondence – are used to examine the politics and psychological character of the split. The author draws out from the bitter controversy Parnell’s articulate and incisive critique of contemporary nationalist politics, and shows how it anticipated the predicament of the modern Irish state. Parnell’s campaign in the split, against overwhelming odds, emerge
#112
For the Land They Loved
Irish Political Melodramas, 1890 1925
1991
Fueled by the Enlightenment's model of revolutionary cultural change, the hopeful Irish rose against British rule in the famous rebellion of 1798. The British responded quickly and violently to suppress
it, and for generations after, Irish school children knew intimately the stories of patriotism, terror, and betrayal that came out of the '98 Rising. The enactment of these stories, through a series of extremely popular political melodramas, reinforced that learning and was fundamental to the evolving sense of Irish nationhood.
For the Land They Loved makes available in print for the first time the complete texts of four of the most ideologically complex and theatrically effective of the many "lost" Irish melodramas produced at the popular Queen's Theatre in Dublin during the late nineteenth and earl twentieth centuries. This edition, complete with period illustrations of playbills, pictorial ads, and portraits, includes a detailed critical and historical essay that weaves the separate narratives of the plays into a sustained story of Irish sociopolitical life in the revolutionary 1790s.
All four plays focus on the '98 Rising. J. W. Whitbread's Lord Edward, Or '98 (1894) and Wolfe Tone (1898) dramatize the consequences of heroism from the aristocratic and United Irish point of view, while P. J. Bourke's When Wexford Rose (1910) and For the Land She Loved (1915) engage resistance from working-class and feminist-nationalist perspectives.
Such plays, shown constantly in Irish cities and small towns as well as overseas, were to become part of the social dialogue that produced another rising in 1916 and beyond. For scholars and students of Irish history and culture, and for anyone interested in understanding the consciousness
behind modern Irish resistance, For the Land They Loved will prove to be essential reading.
#114
Northern Ireland
The Background to the Conflict
1983
Book by
#115
Intimidation and the Control of Conflict Northern Ireland
1987
Visitors to Northern Ireland are often surprised by its confusing mixture of day-to-day normality and general violence. When internment was introduced in August 1971, for example, hordes of reporters were diverted from the world's other trouble spots to Belfast. They were driven from the airport through sunny peaceful countryside into a city busy with shoppers. Around the hotels favoured by visiting journalists, there were few obvious signs of disruption or violence. Yet less than a mile away, as they soon discovered, people were being killed and injured and more than 2,000 families had been forced by intimidation to evacuate their homes during the month of August. The peace and the violence were aspects of the same reality. One was as characteristic of Northern Ireland as the other. The co-existence of normality and abnormality in such a small space is one of Northern Ireland's many contradictions, and is rooted in the dynamics of conflict and in the relationship between conflict and violence. The core of this book is three communities in Northern Ireland. The experiences of people living in them are not typical. On the contrary, they have experienced much higher levels of violence, and live closer to the conflict than most people in the province. All three have suffered greatly from intimidation and the population movements which followed it. It was for this reason they were chosen, for the research aims to examine the process of community conflict through its most violent expression, and the ability of people to deal with its aftermath. What actually happens in a community which is experiencing violent disruption? What are the mechanisms and controls which enable a return to some sort of normality? The emphasis throughout is on interactions and relationships at local level. Discussions of "the Northern Irish conflict" often concentrate on its political and international dimensions at the expense of its operation at ground level. The intention here is to examine the relationships between local interactions and these broader dimensions. The author argues that long familiarity with community conflict in Northern Ireland has led to the evolution of effective mechanisms to control relationships between the two communities; that these mechanisms are essentially local; and that their efficiency and variety hold the key to explaining why a conflict of such duration has not produced more serious levels of violence. They amount to a major and effective safeguard against the conflict expanding into a genocidal war.
#116
Irish Life and Traditions
1986
#119
The Last Bohemian
Brian Desmond Hurst, Irish Film, British Cinema
2023
The Last Bohemian offers the first extended, critical evaluation of all of Brian Desmond Hurst’s films, reappraising the reputation of a director who was born in 1895 in Belfast and died in Belgravia, London, in 1986. Pettitt skillfully weaves together film analyses, biography, and cultural history with the aim of bringing greater attention to Hurst’s qualities as a director and exploring his significance within Irish film and British cinema history between the 1930s and the 1960s. The director of Dangerous Moonlight (1941), Theirs Is the Glory (1946), and his best-known Scrooge (1951) made most of his films for British studios but developed an exile’s attachment to Ireland. How in the early twenty-first century has Hurst’s career been reclaimed and recognized, and by whom? Why in 2012 was Hurst’s name given to one of the new Titanic Studios in Belfast? What were his qualities as a filmmaker? To whose national cinema history, if any, does Hurst belong? Richly illustrated with film stills and other visual material from public archives, The Last Bohemian addresses these questions and in doing so makes a significant contribution to British and Irish cinema studies.
#120
Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland
2022
Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland is a richly detailed exploration of how modern Irish poetry has been shaped by, and responded to, the laws, judgments, and constitutions of both of the island’s jurisdictions. Focusing on poets’ responses in their writing to such contentious legal issues as partition, censorship, paramilitarism, and the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights, this monograph is the first in the growing field of law and literature to focus exclusively on modern Ireland. Hanna unpacks the legal engagements of both major and non-canonical poets from every decade between the 1920s and the present day, including Rhoda Coghill, Austin Clarke, Paul Durcan, Elaine Feeney, Miriam Gamble, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Paula Meehan, Julie Morrissy, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and W. B. Yeats. Poetry from the time of independence onwardhas been shaped by two opposing forces. On the one hand, the Irish public has traditionally had strong expectations that poets offer a dissenting counter-discourse to official sources of law. On the other hand, poets have more recently expressed skepticism about the ethics of speaking for others and about the adequacy of art in performing a public role. Hanna’s fascinating study illuminates the poetry that arises from these antithetical modern conditions.
Authors
Padraic Colum
Author · 11 books
Padraic Colum was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Celtic Revival. (Source)
John Darby
Author · 1 books
John Darby, OBE, BA, PhD
Patricia Boyle Haberstroh
Author · 1 books
Patricia Boyle Haberstroh, PhD
Thomas H. Jackson
Author · 1 books
Librarian note: There is more than one author on Goodreads with this name.
John Gordon
Author · 2 books
John Swan Gordon, M.A., Ph.D. (1945-) is professor emeritus in English, Connecticut College, New London. John Gordon retired from teaching at Connecticut College in 2015. Most of John Gordon's work has been on the writing of James Joyce. His two books published on the subject are James Joyce's Metamorphoses and Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary and a monograph, Notes on Issy. He has also published some fifty articles and notes on the subject, and has delivered a comparable number of papers and numerous reviews. He has been elected as a member of the board of the International James Joyce Society. In addition to the introductory courses taught by all members of the English department, John Gordon has taught courses in Modern Poetry, Contemporary Literature, and most recently, "Modernism and Its Discontents," which alternates between canonical texts of the period, sometimes called High Modernism, and popular novels of the same time.
Richard Power
Author · 2 books
Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1928 Richard Power was English speaking, though he was a great champion of the Irish language. He fathered six children while working as a civil servant. He wrote prose, poetry, and was a scriptwriter. Power's most notable novel was The Hungry Grass (1969)
Standish J. O'Grady
Author · 1 books
Please be careful not confuse him with his cousin Standish Hayes O'Grady. Standish James O'Grady His father was the Reverend Thomas O'Grady, the scholarly Church of Ireland minister of Castletown Berehaven, County Cork, and his mother Susanna Doe (or Dowe). Standish O'Grady's childhood home - the Glebe - lies a mile west of Castletownbere near a famine mass grave and ruined Roman Catholic chapel. He was a cousin of Standish Hayes O'Grady, another noted figure in Celtic literature, and of Standish O'Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore. He married Margaret Fisher and had three sons. Advised to move away from Ireland for the sake of his health, he passed his later years living with his eldest son, a clergyman in England, and died on the Isle of Wight. His eldest son, Hugh Art O'Grady, was for a time editor of the Cork Free Press before he enlisted in the Great War early in 1915. He became better known as Dr Hugh O'Grady, later Professor of the Transvaal University College, Pretoria (later the University of Pretoria), who wrote the biography of his father in 1929. After a rather severe education at Tipperary Grammar School, Standish James O'Grady followed his father to Trinity College, Dublin, where he won several prize medals and distinguished himself in several sports.
Peter Harbison
Author · 5 books
Peter Harbison, PhD
Dan O'Brien
Author · 1 books
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name - fiction writer ^2 - theatrical ^3 - athlete ^4 - philosphy ^5 - economist ^6 - education ^7 - mid-west biologist ^8
Frank Callanan
Author · 1 books
Frank Callanan is a historian, and a Senior Counsel in practice at the Law Library in Dublin.
