Irish Studies
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Fine Meshwork
Philip Roth, Edna O'Brien, and Jewish-Irish Literature
by Dan O'Brien
Part of the Irish Studies series
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 milieus: 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.
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Laying Out the Bones
Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel from James Joyce to Anne Enright
by Bridget English
Part of the Irish Studies series
English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland's cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory-such as readers' competing desires for a story and for closure-with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O'Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.
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Guilt Rules All
Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction
by Various Authors
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Respectability and Reform
Irish American Women's Activism, 1880-1920
by Tara M. McCarthy
Part of the Irish Studies series
In the late nineteenth century, an era in which women were expanding the influence outside the home, Irish American women carved out unique opportunities to serve the needs of their communities. For many women, this began with a commitment to Irish nationalism. In Respectability and Reform, McCarthy explores the contributions of a small group of Irish American women in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era who emerged as leaders, organizers, and activists. Profiles of these women suggest not only that Irish American women had a political tradition of their own but also that the diversity of the Irish American community fostered a range of priorities and approaches to activism. McCarthy focuses on three movements-the Irish nationalist movement, the labor movement, and the suffrage movement-to trace the development of women's political roles. Highlighting familiar activists such as Fanny and Anna Parnell, as well as many lesser-known suffragists, McCarthy sheds light on the range of economic and social backgrounds found among the activists. She also shows that Irish American women's commitment to social justice persisted from the Land War through the World War I era. In unearthing the rich and varied stories of these Irish American women, Respectablity and Reform deepens our understanding of their intersection with and contribution to the larger context of American women's activism.
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Avant-Garde Nationalism at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1940
by Ruud Van den Beuken
Part of the Irish Studies series
In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate's lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate's productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.
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The Playboy of the Western World-A New Version
by Bisi Adigun
Part of the Irish Studies series
Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle's centenary adaption of J. M. Synge's classic The Playboy of the Western World had a sold-out run when it was produced at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 2007 and was brought back by popular demand in 2008. The new version is set in a contemporary Dublin pub and features the character of a Nigerian asylum-seeker in the lead role. Under the coauthorship of Bisi Adigun, artistic director of Arambe Productions-Ireland's first African theater company-and best-selling, Booker Prize–winning novelist Roddy Doyle, the play engages with issues of race and immigration in modern Ireland and, when first released, aimed to be a model for intercultural collaboration.
This critical edition features the full text of the play, published for the first time, along with a collection of essays exploring the play's themes, cultural significance, critical reception, and the legal case that cut short its successful production run. Though the play was first produced over a decade ago, the topic of migration has only increased in its global importance over that time, and this adaptation of Playboy remains a popular touchstone among scholars of Irish theater and immigration.
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Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast
by Sean Farrell
Part of the Irish Studies series
In Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast, Farrell analyzes the career of "political parson" Thomas Drew (1800-70), creator of one of the largest Church of Ireland congregations on the island and leading figure in the Loyal Orange Order. Farrell demonstrates how Drew's success stemmed from an adaptive combination of his fierce anti-Catholicism and populist Protestant politics, the creation of social and spiritual outreach programs that placed Christ Church at the center of west Belfast life, and the rapid growth of the northern capital. At its core, the book highlights the synthetic nature of Drew's appeal to a vital cross-class community of Belfast Protestant men and women, a fact that underlines both the success of his ministry and the long-term durability of sectarian lines of division in the city and province. The dynamics Farrell discusses were also not confined to Ireland, and one of the book's central features is the close attention paid to the ways that developments in Belfast were linked to broader Atlantic and imperial contexts.
Based on a wide array of new and underutilized archival sources, Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast is the first detailed examination of not only Thomas Drew, but also the relationships between anti-Catholicism, evangelical Protestantism, and populist politics in early Victorian Belfast.
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Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama
by Richard Rankin Russell
Part of the Irish Studies series
“Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's 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 strove to create between readers, and script, actors and audience.
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The Last Bohemian
Brian Desmond Hurst, Irish Film, British Cinema
by Lance Pettitt
Part of the Irish Studies series
“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.
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Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism
by Kathryn Conrad
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival
by Giulia Bruna
Part of the Irish Studies series
Between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, the young Irish writer John Millington Synge journeyed across his home country, documenting his travels intermittently for ten years. His body of travel writing includes the travel book The Aran Islands, his literary journalism about West Kerry and Wicklow published in various periodicals, and his articles for the Manchester Guardian about rural poverty in Connemara and Mayo. Although Synge's nonfiction is often considered of minor weight compared with his drama, Bruna argues persuasively that his travel narratives are instances of a pioneering ethnographic and journalistic imagination.J. M. Synge and Travel Writing of the Irish Revival is the first comprehensive study of Synge's travel writing about Ireland, compiled during the zeitgeist of the preindependence Revival movement. Bruna argues that Synge's nonfiction subverts inherited modes of travel writing that put an emphasis on Empire and Nation. Synge's writing challenges these grand narratives by expressing a more complex idea of Irishness grounded in his empathetic observation of the local rural communities he traveled amongst. Drawing from critically neglected revivalist travel literature, newspapers and periodicals, and visual and archival documents, Bruna sketches a new portrait of a seminal Irish Literary Renaissance figure and sheds new light on the itineraries of activism and literary engagement of the broader Revival movement.
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Finders
Justice, Faith, and Identity in Irish Crime Fiction
by Anjili Babbar
Part of the Irish Studies series
Some of the most iconic, hard-boiled Irish detectives in fiction insist that they are not detectives at all. Hailing from a region with a cultural history of mistrust in the criminal justice system, Irish crime writers resist many of the stereotypical devices of the genre. These writers have adroitly carved out their own individual narratives to weave firsthand perspectives of history, politics, violence, and changes in the economic and social climate together with characters who have richly detailed experiences.
Recognizing this achievement among Irish crime writers, Babbar shines a light on how Irish noir has established a new approach to a longstanding genre. Beginning with Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor, who rejects the detective title in favor of "finder"-a reference to Saint Anthony of Padua in the context of a traditionally secular form-Babbar examines the ways Irish authors, including John Connolly, Tana French, Alex Barclay, Adrian McKinty, Brian McGilloway, Claire McGowan, Gerard Brennan, Stuart Neville, Steve Cavanagh, and Eoin McNamee, subvert convention to reclaim their stories from a number of powerful influences: Revivalism, genre snobbery, cultural literary standards, and colonialism. These writers assert their heritage while also assuming a vital role in creating a broader vision of justice.
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Politics, Culture, and the Irish American Press
1784–1963
by Various Authors
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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The Rogue Narrative and Irish Fiction, 1660-1790
by Joe Lines
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Broken Irelands
Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction
by Mary M. McGlynn
Part of the Irish Studies series
While the national narrative coming out of Ireland since the 2008 economic crisis has been relentlessly sanguine, fiction has offered a more nuanced perspective from both well-established and emerging authors. In “Broken Irelands”, McGlynn examines Irish fiction of the post-crash era, addressing the proliferation of writing that downplays realistic and grammatical coherence. Noting that these traits have the effect of diminishing human agency, blurring questions of responsibility, and emphasizing emotion over rationality, McGlynn argues that they reflect and respond to social and economic conditions during the global economic crisis and its aftermath of recession, austerity, and precarity.
Rather than focusing on overt discussions of the crash and recession, McGlynn explores how the dominance of an economic worldview, including a pervasive climate of financialized discourse, shapes the way stories are told. In the writing of such authors as Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Mike McCormack, and Lisa McInerney, McGlynn unpacks the ways that formal departures from realism through grammatical asymmetries like unconventional verb tenses, novel syntactic choices, and reliance on sentence fragments align with a cultural moment shaped by feelings of impotence and rhetorics of personal responsibility.
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Unaccompanied Traveler
The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy
by Various Authors
Part of the Irish Studies series
At the time of her death in 1962, Kathleen M. Murphy was recognized as "the most widely and most knowledgeably travelled Irish woman of her time... insofar as she let herself be known to the public at all." An abiding interest in sacred sites and ancient civilizations took Murphy down the Amazon and over the Andes, into the jungles of Southeast Asia and onto the deserts of the Middle East, above the Arctic Circle and behind the Iron Curtain.
After the Second World War, Murphy began publishing a series of vivid, humorous, and often harrowing accounts of her travels in The Capuchin Annual, a journal reaching a largely Catholic and nationalist audience in Ireland and the United States. At home in the Irish midlands, Murphy may have been a modest and retiring figure, but her travelogues shuttle between religious devotion and searching curiosity, primitivist assumptions and probing insights, gender decorum and bold adventuring. Unaccompanied Traveler, with its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, retrieves these remarkable accounts from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.
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The Irish Revival
A Complex Vision
by Various Authors
Part of the Irish Studies series
The Irish Revival has inspired a richly diverse and illuminating body of scholarship that has enlarged our understanding of the movement and its influence. The general tenor of recent scholarly work has involved an emphasis on inclusion and addition, exploring previously neglected texts, authors, regional variations, and international connections. Such work, while often excellent, tends to see various revivalist figures and projects as part of a unified endeavor, such as political resistance or self-help. In contrast, The Irish Revival: A Complex Vision seeks to reimagine the field by interpreting the Revival through the concept of "complexity," a theory recently developed in the information and biological sciences.
Taken as a whole, these essays show that the Revival's various components operated as parts of a network but without any overarching aim or authority. In retrospect, the Revival's elements can be seen to have come together under the heading of a single objective; for example, decolonization broadly construed. But this volume highlights how revivalist thinkers differed significantly on what such an aspiration might mean or lead to: ethnic authenticity, political autonomy, or greater collective prosperity and well-being. Contributors examine how relationships among the Revival's individual parts involved conflict and cooperation, difference and similarity, continuity and disruption. It is this combination of convergence without unifying purpose and divergence within a broad but flexible coherence that Valente and Howes capture by reinterpreting the Revival through complexity theory.
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Poetry, Politics, and the Law in Modern Ireland
by Adam Hanna
Part of the Irish Studies series
“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.
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Irish Questions and Jewish Questions
Crossovers in Culture
by Aidan Beatty
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Crossing Highbridge
A Memoir of Irish America
by Maureen Waters
Part of the Irish Studies series
Maureen Waters began writing about the Bronx in the spirit of dinnseachas, Irish place lore, as a means of recuperating from the accidental death of her son, whose story frames her own. Finding her way through the disorienting 1960s, after a girlhood tutored by nuns and inspired by the Holy Ghost, she set out on a kind of spiritual journey to recover what was valuable and life-sustaining in the Irish Catholic experience left behind. Writing her memoir meant coming to terms with the powerful matriarchal voices that inspired both affection and immobilizing guilt. Ultimately, Crossing Highbridge is a tribute to her father, for whom storytelling was an art of healing.
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Stepping Through Origins
Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature
by Jefferson Holdridge
Part of the Irish Studies series
Since the eighteenth century, landscape has played complex psychological and political roles in the narrative of Irishness, entailing questions of memory, family, home, exile, and forgiveness. In Stepping through Origins, Holdridge explores the interplay of these concepts in literature. For Irish writers from Swift to Heaney, the Irish landscape has remained not only a reflection of Irish troubles but, much like aesthetic experience, a space in which the bitterness of family or national life can be understood, if not entirely overcome. Through deft analysis of works by leading Irish writers including Lady Morgan, Yeats, Joyce, Louis MacNeice, and Elizabeth Bowen, Holdridge expands and enriches our understanding of how landscape has served as a palimpsest for both family and country, connecting personal with collective memory, localized places with their regions, and individual with national identity.
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Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel
by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan
Part of the Irish Studies series
The desire to engage and confront traumatic subjects was a facet of Irish literature for much of the twentieth century. Yet, just as Irish society has adopted a more direct and open approach to the past, so too have Irish authors evolved in their response to, and literary uses of, trauma.
In Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel, Costello-Sullivan considers the ways in which the Irish canon not only represents an ongoing awareness of trauma as a literary and cultural force, but also how this representation has shifted since the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. While earlier trauma narratives center predominantly on the role of silence and the individual and/or societal suffering that traumas induce, twenty-first-century Irish narratives increasingly turn from just the recognition of traumatic experiences toward exploring and representing the process of healing and recovery both structurally and narratively. Through a series of keenly observed close readings, Costello-Sullivan explores the work of Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Anne Enright, Emma Donohue, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry. In highlighting the power of narrative to amend and address memory and trauma, Costello-Sullivan argues that these works reflect a movement beyond merely representing trauma toward also representing the
possibility of recovery from it.
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Literary Drowning
Postcolonial Memory in Irish and Caribbean Writing
by Stephanie Pocock Boeninger
Part of the Irish Studies series
Literary depictions of drowning or burial at sea provide fascinating glimpses into the often-conflicted human relationship with memory. For many cultures and religious traditions, properly remembering the dead involves burial, a funeral, and some kind of grave marker. Traditional rituals of memorialization are disturbed by the drowned body, which may remain lost at sea or be washed up unrecognized on a distant shore.
The first book of its kind, Literary Drowning explores depictions of the drowned body in twentieth-century Irish and Caribbean postcolonial literature, uncovering a complex transatlantic conversation that reconsiders memory, forgetfulness, and the role that each plays in the making of the postcolonial subject and nation. Faced with fissures in cultural memory, postcolonial writers often identify their situation-and their nation's-with that of the drowned body. Floating aimlessly without a grave, unmemorialized and perhaps unremembered, the drowned corpse embodies the troubled memory of the postcolonial nation or individual.
Boeninger follows a trail of drowned bodies and literary influence from the turn-of-the-century Irish playwright J. M. Synge, through the poems and plays of St. Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, to the lesser-known work of Guyanese British novelist and poet David Dabydeen, and finally to the contemporary Irish plays of Marina Carr. Each author, while borrowing from those who came before, changes the image of the drowned body to reflect different facets of the project of remembering postcolonially.
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The Rebels and Other Short Fiction
by Richard Power
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Israelites in Erin
Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival
by Abby Bender
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Postcolonial Overtures
The Politics of Sound in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry
by Julia C. Obert
Part of the Irish Studies series
Postcolonial Overtures explores the importance of sound in contemporary Northern Irish writing, focusing on the work of three canonical poets: Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. Obert argues that these poets respond to what Edward Said calls "geographical violence"-to the stratification of the North's visual spaces; to the sectarian symbols splashed across Belfast and beyond-by turning from the eye to the ear, tentatively remapping place in acoustic space. Carson, for instance, casts Troubles-era Belfast as a "demolition city," its landmarks "swallowed in the maw of time and trouble," and tries to compensate for this inhospitality by reimagining landscape as soundscape, an immersive auditory field. This strategy suggests sound's political and affective potential: music, accent, and even comfortingly familiar white noise can help subjects, otherwise unmoored, feel at home. Drawing on a diverse range of fields, Obert devotes two chapters to the examination of each poet's work, allowing room for both in-depth formalist readings and contextual and theoretical understandings of the poems and their reverberating effects.
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The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre
Beyond O'Casey
by Elizabeth Mannion
Part of the Irish Studies series
Ireland's Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century.
Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O'Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy "The Shadow of a Gunman," "The Plough and the Stars," and "Juno and the Paycock." Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbey repertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a lesser-known corpus of Irish urban plays, specifically those that appeared at the Abbey Theatre from the theatre's founding until 1951, when the original theatre was destroyed by fire. Mannion illustrates distinct patterns within this Abbey urban genre and considers in particular themes of poverty, gender, and class. She provides historical context for the plays and considers the figures who helped shape the Abbey and this urban subset of plays. With detailed analysis of box office records and extensive appendixes of cast members and production schedules, this book offers a rich source of archival material as well as a fascinating revision to the story of this celebrated institution.
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Irish Women Dramatists
1908-2001
by Eileen Kearney
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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Seamus Heaney as Aesthetic Thinker
A Study of the Prose
by Eugene O'Brien
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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The Irish Bridget
Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930
by Margaret Lynch-Brennan
Part of the Irish Studies series
Many of the socially marginalized Irish immigrant women of this era made their living in domestic service. In contrast to immigrant men, who might have lived in a community with their fellow Irish, these women lived and worked in close contact with American families. Lynch-Brennan reveals the essential role this unique relationship played in shaping the place of the Irish in America today. Such women were instrumental in making the Irish presence more acceptable to earlier established American groups. At the same time, it was through the experience of domestic service that many Irish were acculturated, as these women absorbed the middle-class values of their patrons and passed them on to their own children. Drawing on personal correspondence and other primary sources, Lynch-Brennan gives voice to these young Irish women and celebrates their untold contribution to the ethnic history of the United States. In addition, recognizing the interest of scholars in contemporary domestic services, she devotes one chapter to comparing "Bridget's" experience to that of other ethnic women over time in domestic service in America.
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Standish O'Grady's Cuculain
by Gregory Castle
Part of the Irish Studies series
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 Táin Bó 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.
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Political Acts
Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012
by Fiona Coleman Coffey
Part of the Irish Studies series
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 counter narratives 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 a form 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.
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Joyce / Shakespeare
by Various Authors
Part of the Irish Studies series
Shakespeare's presence in Joyce's work is tentacular, extending throughout his career on many different levels: cultural, structural, lexical, and psychological; yet a surprisingly long time has passed since the last monograph on this literary nexus was published. Joyce/Shakespeare brings together fresh work by internationally recognized Joyce scholars on these two icons, reinvigorating our understanding of Joyce at play with the Bard. One way these essays revitalize the discussion is by moving well beyond the traditional Joycean challenge of "thinking Shakespearean" by "thinking Hamletian," redefining the field to include works like Troilus and Cressida, Othello, and The Tempest. This collection also transforms our understanding of how Hamlet works in and for Joyce. In
compelling essays that introduce new variables to the equation such as Trieste, Goethe, and Futurism, Hamlet's role in Joyce gains fresh mobility. The Danish prince's shadow, we learn, can still cast itself in unpredictable shapes, making Joyce/Shakespeare as rewarding in its analyses of this well-studied pairing as it is when it considers fresh Shakespearean matches.
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Other People's Diasporas
Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture
by Sinead Moynihan
Part of the Irish Studies series
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 now saw waves of newcomers. Moynihan takes as her central question a formulation by sociologist Steve Garner: "What happens when other people's diasporas converge on the homeland of a diasporic people?" Moynihan's approach to Ireland's changing demographics is, however, cultural rather than sociological; she delves into fiction, drama, comedy, and cinema since 1998 for its representations of and insights into race relations. She is particularly interested in how contemporary Irish culture looks to history of Irish-American and African-American race relations as a way to understand its own immigrant communities, arguing that "one of the most palpable trends in contemporary Irish culture is the juxtaposition, literal or implied, of narratives of Irish emigration to the U.S. with those of immigration to Ireland." Individual chapters treat of bestselling novelists Joseph O'Connor (brother of singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor) and Roddy Doyle, and the comedian Des Bishop. A chapter each is devoted to Irish/Irish American drama and cinema.
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All Dressed Up
Modern Irish Historical Pageantry
by Joan FitzPatrick Dean
Part of the Irish Studies series
In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popular-and increasingly grand-in Ireland. These public pageants, a sort of precursor to today's opening ceremonies at the Olympic games, mobilized huge numbers of citizens to present elaborately staged versions of Irish identity based on both history and myth. Complete with marching bands, costumes, fireworks, and mock battles, these spectacles were suffused with political and national significance. Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland. She uncovers unpublished archival findings to present scripts, programs, and articles covering these events. The book also includes over thirty photographs of pageants, program covers, and detailed designs for costumes to convey the grandeur of the historical pageants at the beginning of the century and their decline in production standards in the 1970s and 1980s. Tracing the Irish historical pageant phenomenon through the twentieth century, Dean presents a nation contending with the violence and political upheaval of the present by reimagining the past.
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Representing the National Landscape in Irish Romanticism
by Julia Wright
Part of the Irish Studies series
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.
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The Dark
by John McGahern
Part of the Irish Studies series
Bringing John McGahern's 1965 masterpiece back into print in the United States after years of inaccessibility, this new sixtieth-anniversary critical edition includes an introduction aimed at first-time readers, explanatory footnotes, McGahern's own glossary, and four scholarly essays aimed at guiding readers through the novel's famously controversial history. While the text was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, this edition demonstrates that McGahern's novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland-from the family to the church, to the government's willingness to ignore national and communal trauma. The Dark follows a promising young boy's struggles to break free from the economic and social forces trapping him in a lifestyle that is both familiar and suffocating. At the heart of the novel is the boy's complex and stormy relationship with his abusive, widowed father, who is left to raise a family with little outside aid. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national identity.
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