Books in the Reimagining Ireland series

Proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive field of travel literature.

A key event in Irish cultural memory, the Great Famine still crops up regularly in public discourse within Ireland and among the Irish diaspora. This volume, containing essays by distinguished scholars such as Peter Gray, Margaret Kelleher and Chris Morash, offers new and multidisciplinary perspectives on the Famine.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Providing unique and new perspectives that have been evolved mostly from papers read at an international conference held in Kyoto, Japan, this collection attempts to reassess and explore the values of Irish literature in a global context.

This book contributes to the burgeoning field of John McGahern Studies by offering a collaborative reassessment of his writing. Its contributors provide provocative readings of McGahern's major works and also examine some of his lesser-known short stories, essays and unpublished archival materials which have not yet received due critical attention.

This groundbreaking collection examines popular and literary culture in the 1950s through the lens of postwar Ireland, from Samuel Beckett to Elvis Presley and Movement poetry to bestselling science fiction. The first book of its kind, it blends critical analysis with cultural memory of a unique time in the history of Irish literature.

This volume explores inter-artistic connections in Irish literature, drama, film and the visual arts. It looks at how writers such as Seamus Heaney, John Banville and W.B. Yeats have responded to the visual arts, as well as discussing Brian Friel's drama, James Barry's Shakespeare paintings and contemporary Irish film and visual arts.

These essays offer fascinating insights into the role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture. They explore the importance of food in Irish writing; culinary practices among the 1950s Dublin working class; new trends among Ireland's 'foodie' generation; and the economic and tourism possibilities created by gastronomic nationalism.

The formative influences of Paris and France on the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) cannot be underestimated. These essays examine Moore's "French connections" and explore how his eclectic writings reflect the complex evolution of literature from Naturalism to Modernism through Symbolism and Decadence.

Explores bilingualism and translation in women's writing. This book argues that the 'in-between' or interstitial linguistic areas of bilingualism, translation and regionalism provide a language and imagery suitable for the expression of a specifically female consciousness.

The cultural, political, social and economic interaction between Ireland and Poland has a long and complex history. This volume intends to contribute to an emerging debate around the issues concerned by looking at alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between the two countries.

Beyond Ireland

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.

The engaging figure of Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) comes to light and to life in this collection of perceptive essays on his works and influences. International Moore scholars venture into previously unexplored literary, historical and psychological territory, shining new light on Moore's presentation of the quirks of human nature.

Covering subjects as varied as travel literature, music, philosophy, wine production, photography and consumer culture, and spanning the seventeenth through to the twenty-first centuries, this collection draws attention to the rich tapestry of interconnections and associations which confirm this unique and mutually beneficial friendship.

This collection offers a sustained and up-to-date analysis of the cultural connections between Ireland and Scotland. It focuses on writers, from Charles Robert Maturin to Liam McIlvanney, whose work offers insights into debates around identity and politics in the two nations, often overwhelmed by connections with their larger neighbour, England.

This volume explores canonical novels of the Irish land war, as well as looking at the material conditions of reading and writing in late nineteenth-century Ireland. It includes a reprinted letter by author Mary Anne Sadlier, a reproduction of Rosa Mulholland's little-known play Our Boycotting and a detailed bibliography of land war fiction.

This book explores the differences between 'high' and 'low' cultures in an Irish context, arguing that these differences need constant redefinition. It examines the boundary between elite and popular culture using objects of study as various as canonical Irish literature, postcards, digital animation, surfing and the teaching of Irish mythology.

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.

This collection traces new directions in the study of Thomas Moore (1779-1852) and examines the multiple facets of his complex identity, not only as the foremost Irish poet of his time, but also as a lyricist, satirist, polemicist, patriot and journalist. The contributors are leading scholars of literature, music, history and digital humanities.

Focuses on the intersection between migrancy and the narratives of 'hidden' Irish people - those emergent voices in the Irish diaspora whose discourses have frequently been occluded, repressed or simply forgotten - and provides a platform for a range of subversive voices.

This is the first multi-disciplinary collection of essays on Irish comparisons and contacts with the Czech Lands from the early modern period to contemporary times. Written by leading specialists and emerging scholars, it explores Irish-Czech exchanges and parallels across history, politics, literature, theatre, journalism and physical education.