Bøger i Irish Studies serien

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>Contemporary and previously unexplored sources--newspapers, periodicals, political speeches and private 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 overwhe lming odds, emerges as aneglected political masterpiece.

A collection of essays written by well-known contemporary Irish women poets about their lives in relation to their own poetics.

These short stories invite the reader to see Ireland afresh. Included are works by well-known authors such as Mary Lavin, Edna O'Brien, and Julia O'Faolain; the collection also showcases new writers such as Clare Boylan, Rita Kelly, and Una Woods. Repeatedly, the stories bring us up against the inherent contradiction of provincial Ireland and Ireland as a modern European state, and the complexities of women's lives in both. Helen Lucy>Ita Daly movingly portrays the problems of an educated, sensitive schoolteacher, resigned to her life in a country town. Anne Devlin handles yet another familiar theme: the Irelander in England, an England edgy about IRA bombings. A few stories deal with the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, while others address the troubles of the country as a whole: too many children, too much hypocrisy, too little communication, especially between women and men. The editors have provided an introduction that examines the role of women writers in Irish literature. T-hey have also supplied detailed biographical notes for each contributing author.

A critical edition of Playboy of the Western World-A New Version along with commentary from leading scholars in the field.

In this groundbreaking work, Timothy McMahon reexamines the significance of the Gaelic revival in forming Ireland's national identity. In their determination to preserve and extend the use of Irish as a spoken language and artistic medium, members of the Gaelic League profoundly influenced Irish culture and literature in the twentieth century. McMahon explores that influence by scrutinizing the ways in which society absorbed their messages, tracing the interaction between the ideas propagated by the League and the variety of meanings ordinary people attached to Ireland and to being Irish. Comparing press and police reports with census data and local directories, the author establishes the first comprehensive profile of League membership. McMahon's ability to access both English- and Irish-language sources offers readers a rare and richly detailed analysis of primary materials. Grand Opportunity addresses questions that are central to understanding modern Irish identity and makes an indispensable contribution to the wider study of national identity formation.

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.

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.

For a number of years Robin Skelton has been a major interpreter and definer of what we now mean by Anglo-Irish literature. This collection represents his own selection of fourteen of his best essays. All have been revised, several enlarged, and two are published here for the first time. Two major themes emerge from this collection: verse craftsmanship, with the language and structure of poetry; and a concern with the way that a writer can contrive to bring contraries (personal, national, aesthetic, etc.) together, fusing all the writer's themes and techniques into unity, so as to present a coherent, all-embracing "philosophy" or attitude. Most of the essays move from quite specific discussions of texts to broader generalizations about style and content in Irish writing. As always, Skelton is an extraordinarily alert and careful reader, and some of these essays contain valuable close readings of specific poems. In addition, he has the ability to draw the significant particulars into meaningful accounts of the totality of an artist's achievement. Time after time, Skelton simply makes one see new things, even in the most familiar texts, and his essays offer valuable insights both for the scholar and for the general reader of Irish literature.

Population control was endlessly discussed during Joyce's lifetime, and he was as acutely aware of western civilization's restrictions on artistic and spiritual freedom as on physical fecundity. Lowe-Evans's book explores the specific influence of this controversial debate on Joyce's works, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake, as well as that of other key historical events such as the Great Famine, the Malthusian doctrine, the international birth control movement, the Catholic church, and postwar populationism. As Michel Foucault observed, "one of the great innovations in techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of 'population' as an economic and political problem." Similarly, Lowe-Evans examines Joyce's works as the product of countless rhetorical pressures and trends, including histories of Ireland, the Irish Homestead, and reports of the obscenity trial of Margaret Sanger. Joyce once wrote his good friend Frank Budgen that the idea underlying the famous "Oxen of the Sun" chapter in Ulysses (set in a maternity hospital) was "the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition." Drawing upon this and numerous other instances, Lowe-Evans demonstrates how Foucault's theory of the deployment of sexuality is borne out both in Joyce's work and in the debates that helped to produce it. In Crimes Against Fecundity, Lowe-Evans reveals new and fascinating aspect of this great writer-s work, which will be of great interest not only to literary theorists and Joyceans but to literary scholars in general.

As one of the most experimental works attempted in prose fiction, Finnegans Wake has not yielded to examination easily, but it need not remain a complete enigma. As Michael Begnal emphasizes, Joyce's work is still a novel and can be read as such. Making no claim to simplify the Wake, Begnal challenges the reader to become aware of the multitude of voices at work in the text, to identify and single them out as the narrative rolls along. A pattern of interplay, he asserts, then emerges and gives the reader a handle on Joyce's masterpiece. This critique, arising from a traditional perspective, determines its own field of inquiry and will no doubt spark some healthy controversy among Joyce scholars. In this commonsense, highly readable approach to difficult material, Begnal focuses on voice, theme, and structure. This work has no intention of limiting interpretation, but instead invites the reader to return to narrative and characterization in order to open up the possibilities of Joyce's exploration of a dreaming consciousness his "dreamscheme." Begnal first discusses Finnegans Wake in the tradition of realistic and experimental fiction, then goes on to examine narrative methods, stressing how Joyce uses "narrator interpolations" (asides, interventions, etc.). He then shows how Joyce rejects a single, continual narrative in favor of different kinds of fictional reality, yet still remains true to certain realistic conventions. The method in the Wake is not random, and by concentrating closely upon the structure and the language of the novel, Begnal argues, the reader can follow the signposts which lead to Joyce's grand design. Joyce never promised that this would be easy, but the insights, the laughter, and the rewards will more than justify the midnight oil. Joyce scholars and other enthusiasts--including students and professors--will welcome Dreamscheme as a sharply focused and clear analysis of Finnegans Wake.

The Irish writers of the 1890s-Somerville and Ross, George Moore, Edward Martyn, George Russell, and William Butler Yeats-repeatedly sought to define for their literature and nation a messianic hero and thus to help shape the political and social consciousness of the Irish people.Wayne Hall examines the writing of this decade within its economic and political context, especially the relationship of literature to the issues of land reform and the decline of the Protestant Ascendancy in late nineteenth-century Ireland.Literature and politics tenuously joined forces early in the decade. But the writers came increasingly to identify their own interests with those of the old social order and the landed gentry. They deplored the materialism and egalitarianism that was sweeping aside the manorial past, and as a way of preserving, at least temporarily, the values associated with economic feudalism, they brought to the vanishing way of life its finest artistic expression.The 1890s thus proved to be a crucial transition period, and later Irish writers took many of their themes and literary concerns from this decade. The early stages of the Irish Renaissance also exemplify a problem recurring throughout twentieth-century Western art-the alienation of the artist from society. Failing to unite with and transform the actual circumstances of Ireland, the writers responded by retreating from it and by substituting instead myths of their own making.

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.

The Gaelic hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (often known in English as Finn MacCool) has had a long life. First cited in Old Irish chronicles from the early Christian era, he became the central hero of the Fenian Cycle which flourished in the high Middle Ages. Stories about Fionn and his warriors continue to be told by storytellers in Ireland and in Gaelic Scotland to this day. This book traces the development of Fionn's persona in Irish and Scottish texts and constructs a heroic biography of him. As aspects of the hero are borrowed into English and later world literature, his personality undergoes several changes. Seen as less than admirable, he may become either a buffoon or a blackguard. Somehow these contradictions exist side by side. Among the writers in English most interested in Fionn are James Macpherson, the "translator" of The Poems of Ossian ( 17601, William Carleton, the first great fiction writer of nineteenth-century Ireland, and Fiann O'Brien, the multifaceted author of At Swim-Two-Birds. Aspects of Fiann appear as far apart as Mendelssohn's "Hebrides (or Fingal 's Cave) Overture" and a contemporary rock opera. But the most complex use of Fionn's story in modernliterature is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Illustrates the extraordinary variety of Irish drama today as well as the brilliance of Irish playwrights, both seasoned veterans and those beginning to build reputations on the stages of the world's premier national theater, The Abbey.

Considers the first five novels -- two of which have been made into films -- of popular writer Roddy Doyle in terms of his innovative use of language, his audience's reaction to comedy and humor, the role of religion and politics, and his social vision.

The first major biography of one of Ireland's most powerful figures who became the ecclesiastical Prime Minister of a clerical state.

The book examines Republican policies and activities, and provides a fascinating account of the long, arduous road from arms to politics. It outlines the role of all major players--Adams, McGuinness, Ó Brádaigh, Thatcher, Major, Kennedy, Hume, Haughey, Blair, Clinton. It also includes interviews with a wide range of Republican man and women in their strongholds.

Myers (literature, Gettysburg College) presents 16 interviews that originally appeared in the pages of the Irish Literary Supplement between 1984 and 1994. Following a critical essay exploring some of the aesthetics and conventions of the interview form itself, the conversations record the authors' perceptions of their own works, the process by which those writings came into being, and commentary on other writers' work. The lively give and-take dialogue reveals the passion with which the authors regard literature and their own writing.

The original impetus for our bibliography project was to locate unpublished materials which are useful to researchers but not generally known about, such as the detailed works completed as part of an M.A. or Ph. D. The result has been a collaborative effort (begun in 1988) to list and annotate in one place as many source materials on the Irish in the five boroughs as we could find.

Frank O'Connor (1903-1966) is known primarily for his shot stories, and fine ones they are. There are seventeen of them in this Reader, and the best of them, in the words of Richard Ellmann 'stir those facial muscles which, we are told, are the same for both laughing and weeping.' Except for the masterpiece, 'Guest of the Nation, ' the stories included here have been out of print for twenty years, and one story had been previously unpublished.

Here is one of the classics of modern Gaelic literature-the autobiography of Peig Sayers, a remarkable woman who lived forty years at the edge of survival on barren Great Blasket Island, and who came to be recognized as one of the last of Ireland's traditional storytellers.Here is a story as unforgettable as it is simple. It reveals with fidelity, humor, and poignancy a woman's life in a bleak world where survival itself was a triumph and death as familiar as life. Peig said of her son Tomás, who was killed in a fall from a clifftop: "Instead of his body being out in the broad ocean, there he was on the smooth detached stone. . . . laid out as expertly and as calmly as if twelve women had tended him." Her own farewell to life had the same clear-eyed simplicity: "People will yet walk into the graveyard where I'll be lying; I'll be stretched out quietly and the old world will have vanished."Peig died in 1958, when she was 85. She is buried a short distance from the townland where she was born, above the sea on the Dingle Peninsula, within sight of the Great Blasket Island.Through this American edition, Peig will reach a new international audience. As Eoin McKiernan, President of the Irish American Cultural Institute, notes in his introduction, Peig has the "quality of honesty and sincerity, of life lived at the bone." Long loved in Ireland, this autobiography will now be seen for what it truly is-one of the great heart-cries of the Irish people.

Provides 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. This volume is the first in the growing field of law and literature to monograph exclusively on modern Ireland.

Focuses on the impact of the Famine and the Troubles on the formation and study of Irish cultural memory. Topics considered include hunger strikes, monuments to the Famine, trauma and the politics of memory in the Irish peace process, and Ulster Loyalist battles in the twenty-first century. Gathering the work of leading scholars this collection is an essential contribution to the field of Irish studies.