Books in the Irish Studies series

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.

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.

The story of Frank O'Connor is that of a shy child from a Cork slum who becomes aware that there is something beyond the confines of his life and the lives around him, something grander. And with resolve and labour, he makes his way toward it.

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.

Sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature. The author 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.

In this collection, Joyce experts from around the world have collaborated with one another to produce a set of essays that stage or result from dialogue between different points of view. The result is a sequence of lively discussions about Joyce's most accessible and widely read set of vignettes about Dublin life at the turn of the century.

Since W.B. Yeats wrote 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 been taken as a given. This book brings together scholars to challenge the stereotype that Irish literature has been unconcerned with scientific and technological change.

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.

Between 1878 and 1881, Standish O'Grady published a three-volume History of Ireland. At the heart of this history was the figure of Cuculain, the great mythic hero who would inspire a generation of writers and revolutionaries. This critical edition of the Cuculain legend offers a concise, abridged version of the central story in History of Ireland.

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.

Frank McGuinness's Dramaturgy of Difference and the Irish Theatre

Suitable for courses in Irish theatre, women in theatre, gender and performance, dramaturgy, and Irish drama in the twentieth century, this book examines the plays of five women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day.

Genesis of the Rising 1912-1916

Provides a comprehensive introduction to Old Irish grammar and metrics. Suitable for use as a course text and as a guide for the independent learner, this handbook is also a useful reference work for students of Indo-European philology and historical linguistics. It is filled with translation exercises based on selections from Old Irish texts.

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.