Books published by Cork University Press

This book explores the Skelligs, Ireland's most dramatic and beautiful Atlantic islands, and focuses particularly on Skellig Michael, a famous UNESCO World Heritage Site. It considers why the construction of a remarkable monastic site near the peak of this island over a thousand years ago stands as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of Christianity.

Flann O'Brien: Acting out is the first full-length study to comprehensively address the themes of performance, masking and illusion in the author's fiction, columns, correspondence and scripts. These essays reveal, for the first time, the fullness of O'Brien's literary engagements with diverse theatrical movements (melodrama, revivalism, tableaux vivant, Grand Guignol, modernist anti-theatre) and playwrights (Shakespeare, Goethe, Boucicault, Synge, Yeats, Gregory, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, Čapek).

Terence MacSwiney is most famous as the central figure in one of the great hunger strikes in world history, which culminated in his death in October 1920, aged 41, in Brixton prison, London, after a fast of 74 days. For many years prior to his demise, however, he had been an active participant in the intense cultural and political debates that characterised Irish life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is the first English translation of an important seventeenth-century contention between two Irish clerics. The detail uncovered reveals much about Gaelic-Irish culture and society at this turbulent period in Irish history. The two clerics, Antonius Bruodinus and Thomas Carve, present an image of Ireland that was split between native Gaelic and Old-English culture and the influence of these two cultures on competing views about Ireland's past.

An exceptional collection of original scholarship on the historical Irish Atlantic by leading scholars of modern Ireland and Irish-America. Topics including The Great Famine, the Boston Irish, 1916-era nationalism, and Northern Ireland's Troubles shed new light on the enduring historical theme of Irish identity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Hailed in the Irish Times as a 'great Irish novelist', Neil Jordan is, in the words of Fintan O'Toole, 'a peculiarly emblematic figure of cultural change'. Yet, extraordinarily, such critical acclaim has come about without detailed scholarly engagement with Jordan's most sustained interrogation of Ireland and notions of Irishness: his fiction. Neil Jordan: Works for the page fills this gap in contemporary Irish literary criticism, and, while Jordan's filmmaking is often discussed, the focus here is on his published work: his early volume of short fiction, his many novels, and several of his uncollected stories. The result is a work which will enhance understanding of contemporary Irish cultural studies while also suggesting future directions for the criticism of other artists operating in multiple creative disciplines. Examination of Neil Jordan's changing relationship to modern Irish history through novels such as The Past (1980) and Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), and exploration of the manner by which he represents the War of Independence, the Civil War, the 'Emergency' (World War II), the 1960s, 1980s, and the present day. Detailed analysis of Neil Jordan's integration of the fantastic into his fiction, most obviously in The Dream of a Beast (1983), but also reframing the later novels such as Shade (2005) and Carnivalesque (2017) as more ambitious and speculative works than they were initially received as. Discussion of Neil Jordan's uncollected stories about the filmmaking process, how his work in prose relates to his work in cinema, and how it is impossible to ignore his writings any longer.The significance of this book lies in its discussion of what kind of artist Neil Jordan really is, which is not necessarily the kind of artist that Irish Studies currently perceives him to be. He is neither just an Oscar-winning filmmaker nor a European novelist of the first rank, he is both, and the comprehensive introduction to the literary author provided by Neil Jordan: Works for the Page has been carefully structured to appeal to those familiar with only the filmmaker. This engaging study examines how, in a forty-year writing career, Jordan has engaged with and expanded upon many core concerns of Irish literature: the struggle to define oneself against the weight of history, both political and artistic; the quest to understand the nation's violent efforts to transcend and process its colonial past.

This collection of essays is the first full-length critical study of Walter Macken. Written by some of the foremost scholars in Irish Fiction and Theatre Studies and experts from the Macken archive at the University of Wuppertal, this volume provides ample reason for rediscovering Macken as one of the most fascinating voices of mid-twentieth century Ireland.

There was no native tradition of theatre in Irish. Thus, language revivalists were forced to develop the genre ex nihilo if there was to be a Gaelic drama that was not entirely made up of translations. The earliest efforts to do so at the beginning of the 20th century were predictably clumsy at best, and truly dreadful at worst. Yet by the 1950s, a handful of Gaelic playwrights were producing plays in Irish worthy of comparison not only with those by their Irish contemporaries working in English but also with drama being produced elsewhere in Europe as well as in North America. Obviously, Gaelic drama transitioned with surprising speed from what one early critic called 'the Ralph Royster Doyster Stage' to this new level of sophistication. This book argues that this transition was facilitated by the achievements of a handful of playwrights - Piaras Beaslai, Gearoid O Lochlainn, Leon O Broin, Seamus de Bhilmot, and Walter Macken - who between 1910 and 1950 wrote worthwhile new plays that dealt with subjects and themes of contemporary interest to Irish-speaking audiences, in the process challenging their fellow dramatists, introducing Gaelic actors to new developments and styles in world theatre, and educating Gaelic audiences to demand more from theatre in Irish than a night out or a chance to demonstrate their loyalty to the revivalist cause.This book, which discusses in some detail all of the extant plays by these five transitional playwrights, fills a gap in our knowledge of theatre in Irish (and indeed of theatre in Ireland in general), in the process providing clearer context for the appreciation of the work of their successors, playwrights who continue to produce first-rate work in Irish right to the present day.

Between the fifth century and the ninth, several thousand churches were founded in Ireland the premise of this book is that landscape archaeology is one of the most fruitful ways to study them.