Books in the Reimagining Ireland series

Twenty years after the peace process began in the North of Ireland, many thorny political issues remain unresolved. One of the most significant questions involves the means by which acts of violence and the ideologies that subtended them can be dealt with, interrogated and questioned without rekindling conflict. This book focuses on a number of fictional and non-fictional texts published during the last two decades and analyses, through the prism of French cultural philosopher Jacques Ranciere's work, the emergence of an aesthetics of dissensus within these novels, short stories, graphic novels and memoirs. Associating close textual analyses with wider contextual readings, the book investigates the overlap of politics, aesthetics and the redistribution of the sensible in recent prose works, revealing how the authors avoid the pitfalls of a facile discourse of peace and reconciliation that whitewashes the past and behind which unaddressed tensions may continue to simmer.

This study explores the fiction of John Banville within a variety of cultural, political, ethical and philosophical contexts. Through thematic readings of the novels, Eoghan Smith examines the complexity of Banville's view of the artwork and explores the novelist's attraction and resistance to forms of authenticity, whether aesthetic, existential or ideological. Emphasizing in particular the influence of Banville's major Irish modernist precursor, Samuel Beckett, this book places the local elements of his writing alongside his wide-ranging literary and philosophical interests. Highlighting the evolving nature of Banville's engagement with varieties of authenticity, it explores the art of failure and the failure of art, the power and politics of the contemporary imagination, and the ways in which this important contemporary writer continues to redefine the boundaries of Irish fiction.

This book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation. In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the 'new Irish'. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. Ireland has always been a culturally diverse space and has produced a series of high-profile mixed-race stars, including Phil Lynott, Ruth Negga and Simon Zebo, among others. Through an analysis of screen visualizations of the black Irish, this study uncovers forgotten histories, challenges the perceived homogeneity of the nation, evaluates integration, and considers the future of the new Ireland. It makes a creative and significant theoretical contribution to scholarly work on the relationship between representation and identity in Irish cinema. This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

This book examines film versions of Irish myth, lore, and legend, concentrating particularly on stories which encompass the life journey of the hero, as proposed by Carl Jung and adapted by Joseph Campbell. After establishing the usefulness of film as cultural critique, the author provides intertextual and comparative readings of a number of films which follow a hero's journey. The stages of this journey include the child's struggle to achieve identity and become a responsible member of the community, the adult's ability to move beyond the self and fall in love with another, and the community member's willingness to sacrifice self in the service of Ireland. In addition, the study examines the lore of matchmaking and the communal uses of legend creation, as well as providing an ironic reading of the heroic journey through an exploration of the contemporary anti-hero. The films analysed include Into the West, The Secret of Roan Inish, In America, The Quiet Man, The Matchmaker, Michael Collins, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Veronica Guerin, and In Bruges.

This detailed study explores the significance of the 'Library of Ireland', a book series originated in the 1840s by the Young Irelanders Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy. Focusing on the literary anthologies and literary histories published in this series, the author demonstrates how they attempted to articulate a new national identity for Irish readers based on Young Ireland ideas. Despite the vast amount of scholarly work on Irish nationalism and literature, very little attention has hitherto been paid to the 'Library of Ireland' series. This book recovers the fundamental role played by the series in the creation of a sense of Irish identity, and also examines the publications within the wider theoretical context of anthology studies. It is an original and highly stimulating contribution to the literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century Ireland.

This original and engaging study explores the way in which Colm Toibin repeatedly identifies and disrupts the boundaries between personal and political or social histories in his fiction. Through this collapsing of boundaries, he examines the cost of broader political exclusions and considers how personal and political narratives shape individual subjects. Each of Toibin's novels is comprehensively addressed here, as are his non-fiction works, reviews, plays, short stories, and some as-yet-unpublished work. The book situates Toibin not only within his contemporary literary milieu, but also within the contexts of the Irish literary tradition, contemporary Irish politics, Irish nationalism, and theories of psychology, gender, nationalism, and postcolonialism.

The Irish National Theatre Society began its centenary in 2004 with ambitious theatrical events at home and abroad. By the end of the year, however, the company was close to financial ruin, culminating in its dissolution and subsequent reestablishment. The financial crisis was only one element of controversy during the centenary year. During this period, the remit of the Abbey Theatre as a house for the performance of Irish identity and new Irish writing was brought into question. While debates unfolded over the artistic and financial crises, many commentators queried the very nature of, or need for, a national theatre in twenty-first-century Ireland. Examining organizational issues such as finance and public policy, as well as wider questions about the representation of Irishness on the national stage and the shaping of collective memory through commemoration, this book questions the way that the private concerns of the Irish National Theatre reflect greater issues within Irish society. Drawing together personal interviews, government documents, media sources and comparative studies from the history of the Republic, the author interweaves current and past crises of the Abbey Theatre with the social, cultural and financial anxieties of an evolving Ireland.

This book examines the literary, cultural and metaphorical importance of the Aran Islands through a comparative analysis of Emily Lawless's Grania: The Story of an Island (1892), J. M. Synge's The Aran Islands (1907), Liam O Flaithearta's Duil (1953) and Mairtin O Direain's Danta: 1939-1979 (1980). It draws on hypotheses from postcolonial, utopian and island studies, and focuses in particular on the power of language and the significance of the dialectic of place and space. The author employs a variety of approaches from the fields of cartography, history, geology and cultural studies, in order to give a comprehensive picture of the Aran Islands' importance through the centuries. In its intertextual nature, Between Two Shores emphasises the significance of investigating and studying the literature of Irish and international islands, and the Aran Islands in particular. While employing an insider's approach, the author also gives voice to the contribution of the outsider. The liminal existences described here are a testament to the cultural and interspatial identities of people and writers who negotiate both shores, both linguistic codes and both interpretations of the fixed or fluid island space. This book illuminates the versions and visions of Aran that have been written and that today help to characterise Ireland's most idealised Islands.

In December 1921 the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, which led to the creation of the Irish Free State and the partition of Ireland the following year. The consequences of that attempt to reconcile the conflicting demands of republicans and unionists alike have dictated the course of Anglo-Irish relations ever since. This book explores how the reception of Irish plays staged in theatres in London's West End serves as a barometer not only of the state of relations between Great Britain and Ireland, but also of the health of the British and Irish theatres respectively. For each of the eight decades following Irish Independence a representative production is set in the context of Anglo-Irish relations in the period and developments in the theatre of the day. The first-night criticism of each production is analysed in the light of its political and artistic context as well as the editorial policy of the publication for which a given critic is writing. The author argues that the relationship between context and criticism is not simply one of cause and effect but, rather, the result of the interplay of a number of cultural, historical, political, artistic and personal factors.

This book examines theatre within the context of the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, with reference to a wide variety of plays, theatre productions and community engagements within and across communities. The author clarifies both the nature of the social and political vision of a number of major contemporary Northern Irish dramatists and the manner in which this vision is embodied in text and in performance. The book identifies and celebrates a tradition of playwrights and drama practitioners who, to this day, challenge and question all Northern Irish ideologies and propose alternative paths. The author's analysis of a selection of Northern Irish plays, written and produced over the course of the last thirty years or so, illustrates the great variety of approaches to ideology in Northern Irish drama, while revealing a common approach to staging the conflict and the peace process, with a distinct emphasis on utopian performatives and the possibility of positive change.

In 2005, when John McGahern published his Memoir, he revealed for the first time in explicit detail the specific nature of the autobiographical dimension of his fiction, a dimension he had hitherto either denied or mystified. Taking Memoir as a paradigmatic work of memory, confession, and imaginative recovery, this book is a close reading of McGahern's novels that discovers his narrative poiesis in both the fiction and the memoir to be a single, continuous, and coherent mythopoeic project concealed within the career of a novelist writing ostensibly in the realist tradition of modern Irish fiction. McGahern's total body of work centres around the experiences of loss, memory, and imaginative recovery. To read his fiction as an art of memory is to recognize how he used story-telling to confront the extended grief and anger that blighted his early life and that shaped his sense of self and world. It is also to understand how he gradually, painfully and honestly wrote his way out of the darkness and despair of the early work into the luminous celebration of life and the world in his great last novel That They May Face the Rising Sun.

Both masculinity and the Northern Irish conflict have been the subjects of a great deal of recent scholarship, yet there is a dearth of material on Northern Irish masculinity. Northern Ireland has a remarkable literary output relative to its population, but the focus of critical attention has been on poetry rather than the fine novels that have been written in and about Ulster. This book goes some way towards remedying the deficiency in critical attention to the Northern Irish novel and the lack of gendered approaches to Northern Irish literature and society. Sons of Ulster explores the representation of masculinity within a number of Northern Irish novels written since the mid-1990s, focusing on works by Eoin McNamee, Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson. One of the key aims of the book is to disrupt notions of a hegemonic Northern Irish masculinity based on violent conflict and hyper-masculine sectarian rhetoric. The author uses the three sections of the text to represent the three key facets of Northern Irish masculinity: bodies, performances and subjectivity bound up with violence.

Analyses the influence of the Guinness brand's provenance on advertising campaigns aimed at consumers living in Ireland between 1959 and 1999, and the extent to which Guinness's advertising has influenced Irish culture and society.

Makes a case for the value of trauma and memory studies as a means of casting new light on the meaning of Irish identity in a number of contemporary Irish cultural practices, and of illuminating present-day attitudes to the past.

This book looks at the effects, symptoms and consequences of the period in Irish culture known as the Celtic Tiger. It traces the critical pathway from boom to bust through an analysis of events, personalities and products. The short entries offer a sense of the lived experience of this seismic period in contemporary Irish society.

Ireland and the North is engaged with the relationship between Ireland and the Nordic countries. Chapters include a wide-range of areas including art history, literary history and theory, archaeology, antiquarianism, media studies and political analysis. The book moves beyond the predominant literary paradigm in Irish Studies, expanding the field.

The first comprehensive analysis of the Irish-Argentine community in a century, this book uses the archive of the Southern Cross, the Irish-Argentine newspaper, to analyse the divisions that opened up in the Irish-Argentine community in response to 1916, the two World Wars, Peronism, the military dictatorship, and the Falklands/Malvinas war.

The historiography of Irish theatre has largely been dependent on in-depth studies of the play-text as the definitive primary source. This volume explores the processes of engaging with the documented and undocumented record of Irish theatre and broadens the concept of evidential study of performance through the use of increasingly diverse sources. The archive is regarded here as a broad repository of evidence including annotated scripts, photographs, correspondence, administrative documents, recordings and other remnants of the mechanics of producing theatre. It is an invaluable resource for scholars and artists in interrogating Ireland's performance history.This collection brings together key thinkers, scholars and practitioners who engage with the archive of Irish theatre and performance in terms of its creation, management and scholarly as well as artistic interpretation. New technological advances and mass digitization allow for new interventions in this field. The essays gathered here present new critical thought and detailed case studies from archivists, theatre scholars, historians and artists, each working in different ways to uncover and reconstruct the past practice of Irish performance through new means.

This volume represents a significant new stage in Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broad interdisciplinary approach that includes ground-breaking demographical, economic, cultural and literary research on poverty, poor relief and class relations during one of Europe's most devastating food crises.

Dublin¿s slums were once considered the worst in Europe. The city¿s tenements were omnipresent and their inhabitants were plagued by poverty. Illuminating the intricate relationship between the «dirty» cityscape and Dublin literature from 1880 to 1920, this seminal book offers new socio-historical, cultural and political insights into one of the most interesting periods of Irish literature and history. As well as delineating the characteristics of Dublin slum literature as a genre, the book challenges general assumptions about the Literary Revival as a mainly rural movement and discusses representations of slums in a variety of texts by «Alpha and Omega», James Connolly, Fannie Gallaher, May Laffan, Seumas O¿Sullivan, Frederick Ryan, James Stephens, Katharine Tynan and many others. In addition, it reassesses W. B. Yeats¿s and James Joyce¿s literary genealogy in the context of the urban literary-historical discourse and analyses the impact of slums on their writing strategies. This work will be essential reading for scholars and students of Irish literature and cultural history.

This is the first critical assessment of the work of the Irish author Mary O'Donnell, whose principal themes include contemporary Irish society, the position of women in Ireland and the role of the artist. The essays collected here illuminate O'Donnell's role as a humanist writer searching for truth at all costs.

Late nineteenth-century Ireland saw the emergence of a thriving advertising industry and the Irish child played a vital role in establishing this nascent consumer state. Analysing advertisements, historical materials and literature, this book links the child-centred consumer culture of Victorian Ireland with the setting up of the independent state.

Arguing that certain song types constitute forms of collective memory, this book explores Irish theatre from the 1950s and 1960s to show that songs provide valuable insights into changes in the popular consciousness. As well as illuminating the performances and reception of the plays, it also challenges orthodox narratives of de Valera's Ireland.

This new study investigates how Spain was represented in Irish fiction, plays, poems and travelogues written in a period covering the first five decades of Irish independence as well as the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939-1975).

This volume presents the latest research from Irish studies scholars across a range of disciplines, including history, literature, theatre, photography and folklore, and generates new insights into the dynamics of cultural remembrance in Irish society. It offers an overview of the recent cross-fertilization between memory studies and Irish studies.

This volume examines the relationship between poetic language and place in the work of Paul Muldoon. Through a close reading of the formal aspects of his poems, it explores how poetry as an art form can be engaged to map the complex relationships between language and the material, phenomenal, personal and social aspects of our sense of place.

Within the growing field of TV series studies, little work has yet been done on Ireland. This volume fills the gap by offering new and compelling studies of contemporary Irish TV series. It argues that there is a distinctly Irish culture of TV fiction series and examines some of its finest examples, from Father Ted to Love/Hate and Sin Sceal Eile.