Books in the Reimagining Ireland series

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.

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.

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novels is comprehensively addressed here, as are his non-fiction works, reviews, plays, short stories, and some as-yet-unpublished work.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 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provocative readings of McGahern's major works and also examine some of his lesser-known short stories, essays and unpublished archival materials which have not yet received due critical attention.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Celtic Tiger economy and the post-Tiger context have also seen momentous transformations in the Irish landscape. This book analyses the relationship between the rural and the urban and explores the way it is reflected in Irish literature, culture and language from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day.

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.

After a decade in which women writers have gradually been given more recognition in the study of Irish literature, this title proposes a reappraisal of Irish women's writing by inviting dialogues with new or hitherto marginalised critical frameworks as well as with foreign and transnational literary traditions.

Breaking the Mould

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.

Includes a collection of essays that sets out to correct an injustice to citizens of the Irish Free State, or Twenty-Six Counties, whose contribution to the victory against Nazi Germany in the Second World War has thus far been obscured.

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.

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.

Back to the Future of 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.

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.

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.

Irish women flourished in the publishing world at the turn of the twentieth century, and a number of the most popular and prolific of these authors chose to live and work in Britain. As expatriates, these women occupied a complex cultural space between Ireland and Britain from which they were able to observe the rapidly altering political landscape in their homeland and, in particular, the debates that concerned them as women. This book examines the lives and literature of six Irish novelists - Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M. E. Francis and Katharine Tynan - who lived and worked in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916, between them producing nearly 500 published works. Drawing on a range of their novels, this study explores their participation in the prevailing debates of the era: the Irish Question and the Woman Question. This book was the winner of the 2013 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the role of dance in a wide range of contemporary Irish plays and argues that dance can be perceived as exemplifying the re-embracement of bodily expression by the local culture. The author approaches this issue from a cultural materialist perspective, demonstrating that dance in twentieth-century Ireland was particularly prone to ideological appropriation and that, consequently, its use in contemporary drama often serves to communicate critical and revisionist approaches to the social, economic and political concerns addressed in these plays. The book makes a valuable contribution to current debates about the nature of Irish theatre, investigating recent changes to its traditional, text-based character. These are examined within two important contexts: firstly, transformations in the perception of the human body in Irish culture and, secondly, changes in the attitude of the Irish towards their past and their cultural heritage.

Often hailed as a 'national genre', the short story has a long tradition in Ireland and continues to fascinate readers and writers alike. This volume explores the Irish short story as a hybrid, multivalent and highly flexible literary form, which is forever being reshaped to meet new insights, new influences and new realities.