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

This book examines the influence of American poetry on Seamus Heaney's achievement by close attention to the themes, style, and resonances of his poetry at different stages of his career, including his appointments in Berkeley and Harvard. Beginning with an examination of Heaney's education at Queen's University, this study presents comparative close readings which explore the influence of five American poets he read during this period: Robert Frost, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop. Laverty demonstrates how Heaney returned to several of these poets in response to difficulty and to consolidate later aesthetic developments. Heaney's ambivalent critical treatment of Sylvia Plath is investigated, as is his partial misreading of Bishop, who is understood today more sensitively than in her lifetime. This study also probes the reasons for his elision of other prominent American writers, making this the first comprehensive assessment of American influence on Heaney's poetry. 

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.

Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women's Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women.

The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion discusses how and why the sonnet appeals to Irish poets and has grown in popularity over the last century.

This book addresses both the dissemination and increased understanding of the specificity of Irish literature in Italy during the first half of the twentieth century.

Irish American Fiction from World War II to JFK addresses the concerns of Irish America in the post-war era by studying its fiction and the authors who brought the communities of their youth to life on the page.

The book concerns the new World Irish, tracing the developing profile of the Irish in America from the Famine forward. The studies draw their material from roughly a one-hundred-year arc of Irish presence and relevance in American life and they would serve as American as well as Irish-American studies.

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 examines the topic of excess in modern Irish writing in terms of mysticism, materialism, myth and language. The readings presented illustrate how Matthew Arnold's nineteenth-century idea of the excessive character of the Celt is itself exceeded within the modernity of twentieth-century Irish writing.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

This book examines the relationships between memory, history, and national identity through an interdisciplinary analysis of James Joyce's works-as well as of literary texts by Kundera, Ford, Fitzgerald, and Walker Percy.

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.

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'.

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).

Despite the multifaceted critical attention Dubliners has received since its publication more than a century ago, many readers and teachers of the stories still rely on and embrace old, outdated readings that invoke metaphors of paralysis and stagnation to understand the book.