Books in the New Directions in Irish and Irish American Literature series

This book elucidates the ways the pained and suffering body has been registered and mobilized in specifically Irish contexts across more than four hundred years of literature and culture. There is no singular approach to what pain means: the material addressed in this collection covers diverse cultural forms, from reports of battles and executions to stage and screen representations of sexual violence, produced in response to different historical circumstances in terms that confirm our understanding of how pain ¿ whether endured or inflicted, witnessed or remediated ¿ is culturally coded.Pain is as open to ongoing redefinition as the Ireland that features in all of the essays gathered here. This collection offers new paradigms for understanding Ireland¿s literary and cultural history.

Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett's life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them.

This book analyses travel texts aimed at the emergent Irish middle classes in the long nineteenth century. Unlike travel writing about Ireland, Irish travel writing about foreign spaces has been under-researched.

This book uncovers a new genre of 'post-Agreement literature', consisting of a body of texts - fiction, poetry and drama - by Northern Irish writers who grew up during the Troubles but published their work in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement.

Exploring the effects of traveling, migration, and other forms of cultural contact, particularly within Europe, this edited collection explores the act of traveling and the representation of traveling by Irish men and women from diverse walks of life in the period between Grattan's Parliament (1782) and World War I (1914).

Through close readings of texts by playwright Anne Devlin, poet Medbh McGuckian, and novelist Anna Burns, this book examines the ways Irish cultural production has been disturbed by partition. Ruprecht Fadem argues that literary texts address this tension through spectral, bordered metaphors and juxtapositions of the ancient and the contemporary.

Veteran Joyce scholar Margot Norris offers an innovative study of the processes of reading Ulysses as narrative and focuses on the unexplored implications, subplots, subtexts, hidden narratives, and narratology in one of the twentieth-century's most influential novels.

An important part of the national imaginary, Yeat's work has helped to invent the nation of Ireland, while critiquing the modern state that emerged from it's revolutionary period. This study offers a chronological account of Yeat's volumes of poetry, contextualizing and analyzing them in light of Irish cultural and political history.

As it traces the textual history of the works of authors like Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams, this book analyses Republican resistance to disciplinary structures, demonstrating the ways in which prisoners appropriate space through discursive strategies.

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.

In this book, critically acclaimed author Chris Arthur continues his experiments with the mercurial literary genre of the essay, using it in innovative ways to explore aspects of family, place, memory, loss, and meaning. Through these unique prose meditations, readers are led to a dozen unexpected windows on Ireland.

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.

This book argues that the outskirts of cities have become spaces for a new literature beyond boundaries of traditional notions of nation, class, and gender. Includes discussions of Booker Prize winners Roddy Doyle and James Kelman.

This book examines periodical production in the context of post-revolutionary Ireland, employing the unique lens of genre theory in detailed comparisons between Irish, English, Welsh, and Scottish magazines.

Brivic argues that James Joyce's fiction anticipated Jacques Lacan's idea that the perceivable world is made of language and that Joyce, Lacan, and Zizek all carry forward a psychological and linguistic groundwork for social reform.

This volume explores the ways in which the complicated revolution in British newspapers, the New Journalism, influenced Irish politics, culture, and newspaper practices. The essays here further illuminate the central role of the press in the evolution of Irish nationalism and modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed.

This volume explores the ways in which the complicated revolution in British newspapers, the New Journalism, influenced Irish politics, culture, and newspaper practices. The essays here further illuminate the central role of the press in the evolution of Irish nationalism and modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This book offers fresh critical interpretation of two of the central tenets of Irish culture - migration and memory. This book is essential reading for literary critics, academics, cultural commentators and students with an interest in contemporary poetry, Irish studies, diaspora studies and memory studies.

Irish Presidents, critics, and media initiatives focus on how Irishness is a global resource chiefly informed by the experiences of an Irish diaspora predominantly working in English, while also reminding Irish people 'at home' that Irish is the 'national tongue'.

This book examines how the Irish environmental movement, which began gaining momentum in the 1970s, has influenced and been addressed by contemporary Irish writers, artists, and musicians.

Exploring the effects of traveling, migration, and other forms of cultural contact, particularly within Europe, this edited collection explores the act of traveling and the representation of traveling by Irish men and women from diverse walks of life in the period between Grattan's Parliament (1782) and World War I (1914).

This book situates Joyce's critical writings within the context of an emerging discourse on the psychology of rhythm, suggesting that A Portrait of the Artist dramatizes the experience of rhythm as the subject matter of the modernist novel.

This study examines the representation of marital and extramarital relations in James Joyce's texts, with reference to context and to Joyce's biography. Utell claims that Joyce uses these relations to imagine a different kind of love, one based in a radical acceptance and a rejection of a utilitarian and sexually repressive stance towards marriage.

Reading Ulysses with an eye to the cultural references embedded within it, Kershner interrogates modernism's relationship to contemporary popular culture and literature. Examples underscore Kershner's corrective to formal approaches to genre as he broadens the methodologies that are used to study it to include social and political approaches.

Accordingly, the contributions explore different facets of what we term "Irish minority and dissident identities," ranging from political agitators drowned out by mainstream narratives of nationhood, to identities differentiated from the majority in terms of ethnicity, religion, class and health;

This is the first book on Irish literature to focus on the theme of loss, and how it is represented in Irish writing. The main notion of loss being dealt with is that of death, but feelings of loss in the wake of immigration and of the loss of certainties that defined notions of identity are also analysed.

This collection of critical essays explores the literary and visual cultures of modern Irish suburbia, and the historical, social and aesthetic contexts in which these cultures have emerged.

Irish Presidents, critics, and media initiatives focus on how Irishness is a global resource chiefly informed by the experiences of an Irish diaspora predominantly working in English, while also reminding Irish people 'at home' that Irish is the 'national tongue'.