Bøger i Irish Studies serien

In the early twentieth century, publicly staged productions of significant historical, political, and religious events became increasingly popular - and increasingly grand - in Ireland. Dean explores the historical significance of these pageants, explaining how their popularity correlated to political or religious imperatives in twentieth-century Ireland.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheal mac Liammoir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate became a site of avant-garde nationalism in the Ireland's tumultuous first post-independence decades.

Investigates why writers during the long eighteenth-century so often turned to the rogue narrative to discuss Ireland. With consideration for themes of conflict, migration, religion, and gender, Lines offers up a compelling connection between the rogue themselves and the ever-popular rogue narrative in this early period of Irish writing.

With its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, this book retrieves the remarkable travel accounts of Kathleen M. Murphy from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

With its wide-ranging introduction, detailed notes, and eye-catching maps, this book retrieves the remarkable travel accounts of Kathleen M. Murphy from obscurity and presents them to a new generation of readers interested in travel and adventure.

Reflected in these writings from twenty-one Irish Americans are the themes common to all immigrant literature, but from the authors' own ethnic point of view. Editors Casey and Rhodes have organized these pieces chronologically, beginning at the turn of the century.

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.

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.

Traces a new path through the well-traversed field of modern Irish poetry by revealing how critical engagement with Catholicism shapes the trajectory of the poetic careers of Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Paul Durcan, and Paula Meehan.

Focusing on Irish-made films from 1960 to the 1990s, Scarlata considers the many ways in which filmmakers present the country as "occupied". Exploring Ireland's past in relation to its present, these films become a mode of postcolonial historiography, and, Scarlata argues, they are an important component in the re-evaluation of what constitutes political cinema and political resistance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Theater in 2007 and was brought back by popular demand in 2009. 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 aims 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.