Reimagining Ireland

To mark the fact that the Reimagining Ireland series will soon have one hundred volumes in print, this book brings together a selection of essays from the first fifty volumes, carefully chosen to give a flavour of the diversity and multidisciplinary nature of the series. Following a chronological order, it begins with an essay by Luke Gibbons tracing the roots of modernity from the middle decades of the nineteenth century and concludes with Michael Cronin’s discussion of time and place in global Ireland. In between, the reader will find a rich variety of essays on literary criticism, poetry, drama, photography, modernity, advertising, visual culture, immigration and feminism.

This is a collection that will appeal to anyone with a scholarly or personal interest in the cultural forces that have shaped modern Ireland. It is also a testament to the rude good health of contemporary Irish studies, showcasing the work of a talented array of established and emerging scholars currently working in the area.

This book aims to redress the critical neglect of Frank McCourt’s life-writing, which has been dismissed all too frequently as «misery memoir» and deemed commercially driven or aesthetically and politically naïve. It reassesses the life cycle of McCourt’s work, investigating the experiences that shaped his desire to write and demonstrating a nuanced and multifaceted network of stimuli and references. This new approach reimagines McCourt’s work as a series of complex constructions that are inherently performative in nature (including the multiple identities that he assigns himself) and draw on recurrent clichés and stereotypical characters formed from a medley of literary, theatrical, cinematic and popular performance traditions. The author uncovers reference points, intertexts and sources that McCourt appropriates from the Irish language tradition, storytelling, nationalistic songs, the popular music of New York City, the films of Hollywood, other memoirs, Joycean literature, melodrama and theatre. This dynamic has been recognized by other performance practitioners, and the book also explores how McCourt’s life-writing has inspired creative adaptations for stage and screen.

Departure from Ireland has long occupied a contradictory position in Irish national discourse, alternately viewed as exile or betrayal. This book analyses how departure, as well as notions of home, identity and return, is articulated in the narratives of three members of the Irish diaspora community in Argentina: John Brabazon’s journal The Customs and Habits of the Country of Buenos Ayres from the year 1845 by John Brabazon and His Own Adventures; William Bulfin’s series of sketches for The Southern Cross newspaper, later published as Tales of the Pampas (1900) and Rambles in Eirinn (1907); and Kathleen Nevin’s fictional memoir, You’ll Never Go Back (1946). The book examines the extent to which each writer upholds or contests hegemonic constructions of Irishness, as well as exploring how they negotiate the dual identity of emigrant and potential returnee. Each of the three writers, to varying degrees, challenges the orthodox positionings of the Irish diaspora subject as backward-looking and the Irish emigrant as bound to the national territory. Furthermore, they construct multiple subject positions and contradictory notions of Irishness: national, essentialist and homogeneous versus transnational, diverse and plural. Ultimately, their writings contribute to a rich and nuanced reimagining of the Irish emigrant identity.

What role does nature play in the cultural world of the theatre? Is the auditorium not a natural environment, and how can theatre and nature aesthetics co-exist in the productive expression of performance? Re-Place: Irish Theatre Environments proposes a new way of thinking about Irish theatre: one that challenges established boundaries between nature and culture and argues for theatre performances to be seen as conceptual ecological environments. Broadening the scope of theatre environments to encompass radiophonic and digital spaces, Re-Place is a timely interrogation of how we understand performance history. This book examines the work, both as text and in production, of three canonical Irish playwrights, J. M. Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel, and looks at how theatre documentation can further the idea of a natural performance environment. The questions under consideration extend Irish theatre history into the field of the environmental humanities and draw on new materialist discourse to offer exciting and innovative ways to approach performance.

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 is the first book to provide a critical assessment of the work of the Irish author Mary O’Donnell. The essays collected here engage with O’Donnell’s writing across multiple genres and explore the themes and preoccupations that have characterized her oeuvre. Alongside her creative work, O’Donnell’s has been a steady and continuing voice for many years within the world of theatre criticism, book reviewing, essay writing, radio broadcasts and cultural commentary.


As a writer, O’Donnell’s principal themes include contemporary Irish society, the position of women in Ireland and the role of the artist. Throughout her career, her approach has been unconventional and her work has sometimes presented a challenge to the status quo. The contributors to this volume illuminate O’Donnell’s role as a humanist writer searching for truth at all costs, through the fictive lives of her often unusual characters, and through the emotional range and depth of her poetry.

The sesquicentenary of the Great Irish Famine saw the emergence of seminal, often revisionist, scholarship addressing the impact of the catastrophe on Ireland’s economy (including its relations with Britain) and investigating topics such as the suffering of the rural classes, landlord and tenant relations, Poor Laws and relief operations. The Great Irish Famine and Social Class represents a significant new stage in Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broader 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 volume incorporates a comparative European framework, as well as exploring the issue of class in relation to the British and North American Famine diaspora.

The Irish immigrants who arrived in Argentina between 1840 and 1890 were welcomed. Argentina was different from the English-speaking destinations familiar to other Irish emigrees: the historical antagonism between Catholicism and Protestantism was absent, and Irish immigrants were spared the discrimination experienced by those who settled in America. Argentina was regarded as part of Britain’s «informal empire», and the Irish benefitted economically and socially from being designated ingleses. The co-incidence of interest that developed between Irish-Argentines and British and American capital produced an economically successful community that was keen to protect its social status.

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the Irish-Argentine community in a hundred years. Using the archive of the Southern Cross, the Irish-Argentine newspaper, it analyses the divisions that opened up in this community as it responded to 1916, the two World Wars, Peronism, the military dictatorship, and the Falklands/Malvinas war.

For generations the Southern Cross reflected and reinforced the conservative values of the community. But in 1968 a new editor would challenge the community over its failure to live up to what he considered to be the essence of being Irish: support for human rights and empathy with the poor.

Ireland and the North is an edited collection of chapters engaging with the relationship between Ireland and the Nordic countries. As a spatial and geographical point of reference for the formation of political and cultural identities in Ireland, the idea of «the North» encourages the identification of overlooked connections between Ireland and the Nordic countries, which, like Ireland, are also small nation states on the periphery of Europe. Importantly, the book employs a double conceptualisation of «the North» to include Northern Ireland. Moving beyond the nation state as a key framework for analysis of human activity, this collection engages with the transnational and transcultural in a mapping of connectivity and exchange. Relationships explored are imaginary and material exchanges, civic and personal linkages, literary adaptation and appropriation, transfers of cultural artefacts, political institutions and ideas. Chapters are drawn from a wide-ranging field of study that includes art history, literary history and theory, archaeology, antiquarianism, and media studies in addition to political analysis. With three sections on Material Culture, Political Culture and Print Culture, the book moves beyond the predominant literary paradigm in Irish Studies to make a significant contribution to expanding and developing the field.

This book on the Irish liturgical artist Richard King (1907-74), examines his career in the context of religion, nationalism and modernism. The book focuses on the interdisciplinary relationship between religion and art during pre- and post-Vatican II Ireland. The importance of Irishness and nationalism is shown by the artist’s early secular work of the 1930s and 1940s. His apprenticeship under Harry Clarke (1889-1931) was pivotal for his principal career as a stained glass artist. However, his departure from the Harry Clarke Stained Glass Studios in 1940 allowed him to gradually move away from Clarke’s influence and to develop his own artistic identity. King was also a talented illustrator for The Capuchin Annual and The Father Mathew Record. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, his awareness of the work of other artists in Ireland, England and Europe led him to engage with modernism. The Documents of Vatican II and his interest in the Scriptures and theology enabled King to grow at the spiritual level which was reflected in his religious art of the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s. His study of the theological writings of French palaeontologist, philosopher and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was crucial for King’s more intellectual approach to matters of Christian faith.

This book looks at various effects, symptoms and consequences of the period in Irish culture known as the Celtic Tiger. It will trace the critical pathway from boom to bust – and up to the current beginnings of a similar, smaller boom – through events, personalities and products. The short entries offer a sense of the lived experience of this seismic period in contemporary Irish society.

While clearly not all aspects of the period could realistically be covered, the book does contain essential information about the central actors, events, themes, and economic trends, which are discussed in a readable and accessible manner. Each entry is linked to the overall Celtic Tiger phenomenon and its immediate aftermath.

The book also provides a comprehensive account of what happened in this period and will be a factual resource for anyone anxious to discover information on the areas most commonly connected to it. All entries are written by experts in the area. The contributors include broadcasters, economists, cultural theorists, sociologists, literary critics, journalists, politicians and writers, each of whom brings particular insights to some aspect of the Celtic Tiger.

The last two centuries of Irish history have seen great traumas that continue to affect Irish society. Through constructing cultural trauma, Irish society can recognize human pain and its source/s and become receptive to the idea of taking significant and responsible measures to remedy it. The intention of this volume is to show the mediating role of the literature and film scholar, the archivist, the social media professional, the historian, the musician, the artist and the poet in identifying Irish cultural trauma past and present, in illuminating Irish national identity (which is shifting so much today), in paying tribute to the memory and suffering of others, in showing how to do things with words and, thus, how concrete action might be taken.

Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture 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. The critical approaches herein are of a very interdisciplinary nature, since they combine aspects of sociology, philosophy and anthropology, among other fields. This collection is intended to lead readers to reconsider the connections between trauma, Irish cultural memory, identity, famine, diaspora, gender, history, revolution, the Troubles, digital media, literature, film, music and art.

1959 to 1999 was a pivotal time in the Republic of Ireland’s short history. This book’s journey commences in 1959 when the country had just taken its first steps on the road to internationalization. It concludes 40 years later in 1999, by which time Ireland had metamorphosed into one of the most globalized countries in the world. Inevitably, many of the country’s cultural and societal norms were challenged. The author charts many of the changes that occurred over the course of those years by piecing together a large number of the ads held in the Guinness Archive. Just as Irishness, cultural specificity and the provenance of Guinness formed an integral part of these ads, so too did the growing prevalence of international cultural tropes. The book seeks to interrogate the following: the influence of the Guinness brand’s provenance on advertising campaigns aimed at consumers living in Ireland; the evolution of cultural signs used in Guinness’s advertising campaigns aimed at consumers in Ireland between 1959 and 1999; the extent to which Ireland’s social and economic history might be recounted through the lens of Guinness’s ads; the extent to which Guinness’s advertising might have influenced Irish culture and society.

This volume embraces the critical turn of new materialism in order to address how creative and social practices allow for the definition of alternative subject positions and to examine how power relations operate at an embodied, relatable level: it proposes to think global but act local. The contributions by scholars and artists offer new ways of engaging and understanding Ireland’s contemporary political, activist and artistic landscape. They open up onto epistemological ways of considering not only the inventions of creative and scholarly research and practice, but also invention and experimentation itself. The volume provides a space for conversation and brings out the potential of non-linear thinking by bringing together artists and scholars to consider the materiality of identity and place through the body, migrancy, ecology and digital technologies. The contributors draw new maps, making new connections, diffracting Irish social imaginaries. This multidisciplinary collection proposes strategies and methods to ethically respond to and engage with the complex situations and urgent challenges that preoccupy our contemporary present. There is something in this book for both the specialist and non-specialist alike and it is essential reading for anyone with an interest in new methodologies in Irish studies.

The British context has been a controversial area for those involved in Irish literature and Irish studies. Behind the present volume lies a search for a view from which the frame of the British context as well as the dichotomy between British and Irish literature can be dismantled and disrupted in a most creative sense. It addresses the question of Irish literature’s intrinsic openness by first focusing on the British context that affected Irish literary production through three centuries and then looking beyond it towards the European or global context that lay behind Irish modernism. The book further extends its research to modern Irish poetry and discusses three prominent poets after W.B. Yeats whose works are in and beyond the British context in each different way. Providing unique and new perspectives that have been evolved mostly from an international conference held in Kyoto, Japan, this collection attempts to reassess and explore the values of Irish literature in a global context.

Ireland’s Great Famine generated Western Europe’s most devastating social crisis of the nineteenth century, a crisis that created enormous and transformational upheaval. In Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine: Politics, Tourism, and Scandal, 1845-1853, author Catherine Nealy Judd proposes that a new literary genre emerged from the crucible of the Great Famine, that is, the Irish Famine travelogue. In her keenly argued and thoroughly researched book, Judd contends that previous scrutiny of Famine travel narratives has been overly broad, peripheral, or has tended to group Famine travelogues into an undi erentiated whole. Judd invites us to consider Famine-era travel narratives as comprising a unique subgenre within the larger discursive - eld of travel literature. Here Judd argues that the immensity of the Famine exerted great pressure on the form, topics, themes, and goals of Famine-era travelogues, and for this reason, Famine travel narratives deserve detailed and organized consideration, as well as critical recognition of their status as an unprecedented subgenre. Drawing on an extensive array of underutilized sources, Travel Narratives of the Irish Famine adumbrates the Irish Famine travelogue canon.

The current «decade of centenaries» and commemorations on both sides of the Irish Sea is providing an opportunity both to reflect upon significant events and challenges that the island of Ireland has been confronted with in the past, and also to contemplate and focus on the future.

This multi-disciplinary volume owes much to the ongoing debate within Northern Ireland, as an integral part of the conflict transformation process, on how to build a shared and better future for all citizens out of a divided and traumatic past. Drawing on the cross-disciplinary nature of Irish Studies, the authors from the fields of history, literary and cultural studies, politics and sociology explore the legacy of the Troubles and the consequences for Northern Ireland more than twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement.

This landmark collection marks the publication of the 100th book in the Reimagining Ireland series. It attempts to provide a «forward look» (as opposed to what Frank O’Connor once referred to as the « backward look») at what Irish Studies might look like in the third millennium. With a Foreword by Declan Kiberd, it also contains essays by several other leading Irish Studies experts on (among other areas) literature and critical theory, sport, the Irish language, food and beverage studies, cinema, women’s writing, Brexit, religion, Northern Ireland, the legacy of the Great Famine, Ireland in the French imagination, archival research, musicology, and Irish Studies in North America. The book is a tribute to Irish Studies’ foundational commitment to revealing and renewing Irishness within and beyond the national space.

Since the publication of James Smith’s groundbreaking book on the Magdalene laundries in 2007, many developments have made the issue even more topical. Even though the lack of access to archives and records of religious orders remains a major obstacle to writing a comprehensive history of the Magdalene laundries, the accessibility of witness testimony and the publication of the McAleese report in 2013 have opened up new avenues of research and methodology.

Written from the perspective of a French academic using French theory, holocaust studies and memory studies to analyze an eminently Irish question, the present publication proposes to make an assessment of the way the issue has evolved from being a media story at the onset of the twenty-first century to becoming a subject worthy of historians’ attention. If the McAleese report was a formative moment in anchoring the Magdalene laundries into the national narrative, this book will show how it also contributed to dis-remembering the laundries by offering a doctored and state-sponsored version of what really happened within the institutions and contributed to preventing proper memorialization. It will show how in the absence of official memorialization, cultural and activist memorial practices have emerged and developed to ensure that this particularly painful and infamous episode in the history of the nation state does not fall into oblivion.

This is the untold story of Counteract, the trade union sponsored anti-sectarian unit tackling violent sectarianism in the workplace in the Northern Ireland conflict. As the death toll mounted through the 1980s key union women and men started what was planned as a campaign to support workers and became a ground-breaking facility for mediating sectarian disputes in the workplace in these violent times. People were shot for challenging flags at work, drivers hijacked at gun point and forced to drive bombs, taxi drivers murdered in tit-fortat sectarian killings, and workers were forced out of jobs because of sectarian threats and intimidation. This is a hidden part of the peace process, showing the path from «Shipyard confetti» to nuanced expressions of sectarian hostility.

The Picture Postcard, a new window into Edwardian Ireland uses the material culture of the picture postcard as a lens through which to examine life on the island of Ireland during the Edwardian period (1902-10). Picture postcards became extremely popular worldwide at the start of the twentieth century, when literally hundreds of billions of them were produced and sold.

This book draws on postcard collections to access the everyday lives of people who rarely make it into conventional historical narratives, and to make connections in an Irish context between their «small histories» and broader, well-studied discourses such as identity, nationalism, empire, modernity, emigration, tourism and the roles of women.

Following the recent advancements in Irish lesbian politics, North and South, lesbian writing is attracting more attention from scholarly audiences, making this body of work particularly timely. Irish Lesbian Writing Across Time is an attestation of a historical presence of lesbians in Irish literature, as it analyses the progression of Irish lesbian narrative over the past two centuries, while verifying key characteristics of time periods that correspond with the model of development. It also investigates Irish lesbian activist literature, writing from diaspora, and fiction published around the time of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts and later the inclusion of same-sex marriage in Irish and Northern Irish laws.

The book examines authors such as Maria Edgeworth, Sarah Grand, George Egerton, Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Emma Donoghue, Mary Dorcey, Anna Livia, Shani Mootoo, and Hilary McCollum, whose inclusion of lesbian desire to the Irish literary canon proves an invaluable contribution.

More than twenty years after the peace agreement signed in Belfast on 10 April 1998, an assessment is overdue, particularly given the current political context in Northern Ireland. A serious political crisis led to the suspension of the regional institutions from January 2017 to January 2020, and the Brexit negotiations did not facilitate the search for a solution, especially as the confidence-and-supply agreement between the British Conservative Party and the DUP prevented London from acting as an honest broker between Sinn Féin and the DUP. At the same time, the issue of the Irish border created tensions between Dublin and London. This situation was compounded by the resurgence of rioting, mostly in Loyalist areas of Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, in April 2021, against the backdrop of Brexit’s Northern Ireland Protocol and communal resentment.

Emanating from a conference jointly organised at the University of Caen Normandy and La Rochelle University, this collection of essays – bringing together academic and independent scholars from various disciplines and nationalities – takes a critical look at the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, from the collaboration between Dublin and London to the new political configurations in Northern Ireland, as well as interfaith, cultural, social and economic developments. Divided into three main parts, it furnishes an opportunity to better understand the reasons for the apparent deterioration in inter-community understanding since 1998, but also to study the numerous initiatives that have sought to promote reconciliation, be it in the economy, the working environment, in the literary and artistic spheres, in schools or in the urban landscape.

By the early 2000s, women in Ireland were arguably freer than any past generation to shape their sexual lives amidst the social freedoms of a globalised society. The Salley Gardens presents reflections from seventy-three heterosexual young women on growing up, forming sexual relationships and some becoming mothers in the last years of the «Celtic Tiger». The authors explore their hope and despair about what it means to be a woman, to use their agency, within the inescapable tensions of newly wealthy Ireland. Their efforts to build their sexual lives are complex and the significant problems they encountered remain unresolved.

Women’s search for agency is woven into our complex history and continues to reverberate. The bewildering juxtapositions young women faced fifteen years ago have intensified in the present. Then and now, we face conflicts with social expectations of our lives as sexual women, caring women, partners, wives, and mothers.

Turning our older history in Ireland towards an exuberant resistance enables us to illuminate the limitations of the female identities imposed by contemporary Ireland. The Salley Gardens helps us rethink what we mean by agency and resistance, revaluing women’s actions as we endeavour to value our own lives.

Voices from the Margins explores the particular emphasis that women writers of Troubles short fiction have placed on gender and the everyday, two areas which have often been relegated to the margins of the «official story» about the Northern Irish conflict and peace process. Women’s Troubles short stories integrate the domestic plot into the larger historical framework of political violence, reconceptualizing and blurring the boundaries between the private and the public and capturing the many ways in which the conflict has impacted and been disruptive of the private space. This book shows how these women have rewritten the «official story» with narratives that foreground the personal histories of the Troubles over a public History which has largely been based on the division between the pro-state and anti-state nationalisms in Northern Ireland.

Northern Windows/Southern Stars is a valuable, accessible and thought-provoking gathering of essays by the distinguished Irish poet and Professor Emeritus, Gerald Dawe. Re-tracing the issues and questions of poetry and politics in the Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s, the collection provides energetic and unexpected views of one poet’s critical readings, including the work of several overlooked poets of the time. While offering fascinating insights into the early processes of reimagining the canon of Irish poetry, Northern Windows/Southern Stars is full of thoughtful and telling reports from a very different Ireland at the point of significant transition by the turn of the millennium.

In spite of recession, austerity and pandemics, Ireland has demonstrated an extraordinary degree of resilience, becoming one of the most successful economies in Europe and developing into a society remarkably at ease with itself. This book argues that the seeds of this achievement were sown between the mid-1950s and 1960s, when a Second Irish Revival took place which was comparable to the earlier Celtic Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

At the heart of this revival were three men: T. K. Whitaker, the youthful Secretary of the Department of Finance, Seán Ó Riada, musician and composer, and Thomas Kinsella, poet, translator and academic. Ó Riada and Kinsella were close friends in Dublin’s emerging artistic world of the 1950s but Kinsella was also Whitaker’s private secretary in the Department of Finance.

The three men, although very different in background and personality, shared a deep knowledge and love of Irish culture, heritage, history and language, but they were also determined to study and absorb the best of what the world could offer in their respective fields of endeavour and it is argued that this combination was a critical factor in their contribution to Irish society.

The book will review the arguments of the sceptics who disagreed with Ireland’s embrace of globalisation and will conclude with a speculative account of how the Mandarin, the Musician and the Mage might like to see Ireland develop in the 2020s.

«Gerald Dawe observes in the concluding lines of Dreaming of Home that the writers he admires most are those who convey a sense of ‹the sheer joy in witnessing the world for its own sake.› Those same words could apply to Dawe himself. His readings of seven writers here – Sean O’Casey, W.B. Yeats, John Montague, Patrick Kavanagh, Derek Mahon, Colette Bryce, and Gail McConnell – are animated as much by the sheer joy of reading as by the need to analyse or explain. This is not just a wise book, but a joyous one.»
(Chris Morash, MRIA, FTCD
Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing, TCD)
　
In this vibrant and accessible sequence of readings, Gerald Dawe explores the meaning of home in the work of Irish writers, including W. B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Derek Mahon and Gail McConnell. Providing ample encouragement to think about literary questions in a fresh and engaging way, Dreaming of Home concludes with an afterword of praise for the example of the great American poet William Carlos Williams, who mattered greatly to Dawe’s own development as a poet. Scholarly and stylish in approach, Dreaming of Home is an invaluable study for the general reader and student alike.

Following the significant advance of English in Ireland during the 18th century, the restoration of Irish as the vernacular language formed a key part of a broad cultural Revival movement from the late 19th century. Many of those who fought figuratively or literally for independence learned Irish to varying degrees of success or broadly supported the aims of the Revival movement. Significant policy measures to promote Irish were adopted following independence in 1922, particularly in the fields of education, legal status and public administration. Despite decades of contestation around revitalisation, Irish continues to enjoy institutional supports denied to many other European minority languages but remains weak as a community language.
　
Published in the centenary year of the foundation of the Irish state, this book reviews one hundred years of government policy on Irish and assesses its relative success or failure. Based on theoretical perspectives on language policy and revitalisation of minority languages, it analyses the development and implementation of Irish language initiatives in five thematic areas: speakers, the Gaeltacht, education, legislation and broadcasting. Each chapter includes an overview of the topic and a detailed case study on an aspect of it, drawing heavily on archival sources related to both the state and civil society organisations.

Neil Jordan is immediately associated with the successful films he has directed (The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins...). And yet, he is also a man of letters. His literary work, composed of eight novels and a collection of short stories, is rich, dense and complex. It shows an interest in Irish history and politics, but also in the supernatural and the irrational. It creates a universe where time and space can abolish themselves, the material and the spiritual merge, the visible and invisible interpenetrate. Jordan’s fiction also transgresses the borders in more than one way. Both realistic and fantastic, it establishes numerous connections with psychoanalysis, Christian religion, mythology or cultural tradition, and revisits them in an original way. The present study approaches Neil Jordan’s literary work in all its diversity. It focuses primarily on the novelist, but also on the short story writer and the screenwriter, as his film making cannot be ignored. This book, devoted to the writer, aims to do justice to a major figure in contemporary Irish cultural life, whose artistic creation remains largely unexplored.

The book deals diachronically with Irish crime fiction, from the picaresque of the 17th century up to the late 1990s when the «Emerald Noir» boom began. Irish writers, often without due recognition, have been instrumental in the development of the genre on an international level, and figures such as Le Fanu, Meade, Childers, Wills Crofts have been responsible for many of the innovations in crime fiction which have later become standard. This book examines Irish crime writing in its widest sense, from the detective mystery to the spy thriller, and seeks to vindicate the relevance of the Irish contribution to the field of crime fiction as well as stressing the importance of crime writing within the field of Irish Studies. This work traces Irish crime fiction from the early appropriation of the picaresque, which would gain resonance throughout Europe, through the gothic, the early detective tale, to the Irish contribution to the Golden Age mystery, to Irish hard-boiled pulp and inner-city police procedurals in which crimes committed by Irish criminals are investigated by Irish agents of detection.

From the perspective of Irish Studies, this book seeks to interrogate the discourses and processes that produce and reproduce «Ireland’s cultural politics of in/difference», and its effects both in the material experience of Othered subjects and in their representation in cultural and literary forms. At the same time, it also examines strategies of dissent or resistance and possible alternatives that are being articulated both in the socio-political and the cultural arena, contributing to our communal thinking and imaginative creation of more effective forms of building community based on solid equity and social justice grounds.

In the eighteenth century, Ireland’s elite could choose from a wide range of wines, but their favourite was claret – the red wine of Bordeaux. Whereas Britain’s wine drinkers turned to port in this period, and America’s elite filled their glasses with Madeira, in Ireland, claret flowed in the social world of the privileged classes. This book looks back to earliest times to trace the story of how and why a French wine became what Jonathan Swift fondly called «Irish wine». Exploring the social life of claret in Georgian Ireland through a range of period sources reveals the social meanings attached to this wine and expands our knowledge of Ireland’s fascinating food history.

Evelyn Conlon is one of Ireland’s most important writers. She has published four collections of short stories, My Head is Opening (1987), Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour (1993), Telling: New and Selected Short Stories (2000) and Moving about the Place (2021) and four novels, Stars in the Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998) Skin of Dreams (2003) and Not the Same Sky (2013). She has also edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004).

Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing is the first book to provide a critical assessment of her work. Drawing on a variety of perspectives such as feminism, ethics, famine studies, mobility studies, translation studies, short fiction, narratology and historiographic metafiction, the essays gathered in this volume reveal that Conlon’s writing, characterised by sharp observation, insistently questions the predetermined course of female existence, explores alternative forms of freedom and ultimately reflects her commitment to seek and tell truths. The intersectional approach of the book is part of a current endeavour in Irish Studies to keep interrogating well established topics, to examine the elusiveness of others and to explore new boundaries through renewed epistemological and ethical positions.

«The Irish missionary momentum in the 19th century attests to the vitality of a Christian community whose richness and great diversity this book illustrates, with particular emphasis placed on the considerable effort made in the field of education, a privileged way for human promotion and the proclamation of the Gospel.»

(Bernard Ardura, President, Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences)

«This book is a wonderful read: well researched, fascinating, clear, insightful and learned. It is an exceptional testimony of the achievements of the Irish Religious Diaspora. It is fundamental reading during a period in which our country has become a destination country, hosting so many from all parts of the globe. Although a small country on the periphery of Europe, Ireland was capable of projecting its values and culture globally through its diaspora. The Irish religious diaspora, as illustrated so deftly in this book, is a notable example of this throughout the ages. This book informs us and reminds us so well of the extraordinary efforts and tireless endeavours of the Hiberno-Roman missionaries in exporting Irish Catholic values globally over past centuries. The book is a pleasure to read.»

(Patricia O’Brien, Ambassador of Ireland in Rome)

Sourcing the circulation, settlement and influence of the Irish religious groups in continental Europe, the Americas, Australia and South Africa, the volume starts in Lisbon in the sixteenth century. How did Lisbon become the hub of Irish trade and the seat of the Irish Catholic Church in exile after the Reformation? Where did it move on from there in modern and contemporary times? At a time when Irish missionaries have largely returned home to a country that has often been described as «post-Catholic», this collection brings together historians and literary critics who trace the trajectories, destinies, acculturation and shifting senses of identity of Irish Catholic clerics and missionaries across the globe from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Studies of postwar Europe, Latin America and South Africa show the modern expression of the Irish Catholic missionary movement, as well as some of the same spiritual and ethical preoccupations that are captured in the literary works of some of the most famous French, Irish and Irish-American authors.

«An important contribution to understanding our culinary journey in Ireland from a time when food was regarded merely as sustenance. As a nation, we have grown in confidence. Up to relatively recently in Ireland, we had a serious inferiority complex and not just about our food and food culture. Brian documents through various prisms the growing pride in our tradition, the quality of our produce and the growing skills of our chefs. At last, we appreciate what we have here in Ireland and serve our Irish food proudly.»

(Darina Allen, Ballymaloe Cookery School)

Through concepts such as place and story, this work considers the cultural importance of the foods we eat and the drinks we imbibe in Irish society. While providing us with the necessary sustenance to survive, they also have something to say in terms of how we relate to each other and the world around us. The book examines the products we associate with gastronomy in Ireland and the uniquely Irish places in which they are consumed. Places considered include the Irish pub, the traditional Irish butcher shop and the Irish whiskey distillery. Both products and places are explored through the lens of terroir, experience and the impact of Third Place and Fourth Space paradigms. Though much of what is discussed here is anchored in the past, the book also examines how that past has impacted on more contemporary phenomena such as Irish café culture and social gastronomy. While the work is primarily focused on Ireland, it draws insights from lessons learned in countries like France that possess a widely renowned gastronomic legacy. In addition to the obvious food connections, the chapters in this work are all linked by a common thread of personal engagement that stems from a lifetime spent working in and around the food and drink sector.

«This dazzling collection of essays draws out the complexity of Ireland’s connections with British imperialism.　The volume takes an admirably wide-ranging and generous approach to Irish visual culture, showing how features such as Irish fashion, architecture, and museum display have been affected by empire.　Those interested in Irish art, in Irish culture, and in the legacies of imperialism more generally will find this book insightful, illuminating, and provocative.»

(James Moran, Professor of English, University of Nottingham)

«Ranging across a broad chronological span, this stimulating collection’s focus on the role of the British empire within Irish art and visuality is much-needed. This book will be invaluable not just for scholars of Irish culture, but for the study of the crucial significance of the visual in the historical formation of empire more generally.»

(Fionna Barber, Reader in Art History, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This collection of essays discusses how the British empire resonates in a huge array of visual culture in Ireland from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. The book is about the way empire has pervaded and continues to pervade Irish art and visual culture. The collection of essays expands the analysis of things visual in terms of Ireland and the British empire to include a broad range of cultural matter: art exhibitions, museums and their displays, architecture, photography, illustrated books, fashion, public and private performances and entertainments, as well as paintings, sculpture, prints and book illustration. The essays only touch on some of the issues that need to be discussed in relation to Ireland and the visual culture of imperialism, but it is hoped that this volume will spark others to investigate the topic and thus greatly expand Irish visual historiography.

«Paul Butler’s monograph is a wonderful illustration of how a visual reading of McGahern can reveal previously undiscovered aspects of the writer’s aesthetic approach. ‘The Deep Well of Want’ of the title is an expression that captures the pain and hurt at the core of the life journey of both writer and photographer. Paul’s exquisite photos allow us a special entry into ‘McGahern Land’, whose landscape and people nurtured the writer’s creative inspiration. This indispensable study will deepen McGahern readers’ understanding of what lies at the core of his artistic quest.»

(Eamon Maher, TU Dublin)

This book represents a unique visualisation of the world of Irish writer John McGahern through his words and the imagery of artist Paul Butler. Traumatic events in the lives of both McGahern and Butler shaped their paths, creating a want to write in McGahern and a want to create imagery in Butler. Butler explores the difficult and complex childhood that the two shared, and through a series of beautiful images that he himself has created in McGahern’s own part of Ireland, he draws parallels between them and, as Eamonn Wall says in his Preface, produces a rich and life-affirming appreciation of literature, art and imagery.

This book focuses on the most successful feature films of John Carney, namely Once (2006), Begin Again (2013) and Sing Street (2016). Drawing on narrative, formalist and genre theories of film, the book presents an in-depth examination of how the formal and stylistic choices made by Carney allow each film to narrate a story in a coherent way. It shows how aural and visual contrivances are hidden behind a façade of realism, and how the films engage with universal, national and personal concerns and also how they relate to each other and to Irish and American film in general. It also explores the textual articulation of genre in each and the discrepancies between such articulation, the genre expectations set up by the promotional discourse coming from the publicity materials and events accompanying each release, and the genre labelling of each film in contemporary reviews by professional critics from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland.

«Politic Words is an invigorating mix of the personal, the political and the poetic. Gerry Dawe flings his net wide. From Eavan Boland’s ‘secret history’ of women to war memoirist Christabel Bielenberg’s luminous prose; from the vaulting ambition of Éilís Dillon’s historical fiction to hunger striker’s Bobby Sands’ favourite poet, the now unsung Ethna Carbery, he takes us on a bracing journey from the Troubles to Brexit. Drawing on contemporaneous criticism, Dawe revitalizes 35 years of cultural history into urgent news from the literary front.»
(Mary Morrissy, Novelist and former associate director of the writing programme, University College Cork)

Politic Words reflects five decades of writing about and discussing Irish literature, both inside the university classroom and in various literary and academic forums. Part one concentrates upon Irish women writers, their influence and example including Edna Longley, Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin alongside the achievements of younger contemporaries such as Lucy Caldwell and Leontia Flynn. Part two develops some of the historical settings and themes of part one while exploring the social and political legacies of traumatic Irish historical events such as the Great Famine, and its representation in the fiction of William Carleton and reimagined by later interpreters including Benedict Kiely. The collection concludes with a series of readings of Irish culture and politics in terms of the legacy of the Troubles, the impact on Ireland of Brexit and renewed calls for Irish reunification. Politic Words is the final part of a trilogy of studies by Gerald Dawe published by Peter Lang in their Reimagining Ireland series.

«Marjan Shokouhi’s new book attests to the ways in which Irish ecocritical scholarship has developed into more than a simple ‘subfield’ of Irish Studies. Shokouhi takes readers on a fascinating journey through the work of three iconic Irish poets in the modern period – Yeats, Kavanagh and MacNeice – from the burgeoning perspective of Irish ecological criticism, exhibiting the complexities of the Irish Literary Revival in addressing questions of place and identity and opening new avenues of research in relation to new voices and marginal identities.»

(Pilar Villar-Argáiz, University of Granada, Spain)

«From wild ancient forests to the Lagan riverside, From Landscapes to Cityscapes offers a new take on the sense of place in modern Irish poetry. Using Heidegger’s concept of dwelling, it examines the verse of Yeats, Kavanagh and MacNeice from an ecocritical perspective in a worthy contribution to the field.»

(Audrey Robitaillié, Lecturer in Anglophone Literature and Irish Studies, Institut Catholique de Toulouse)

The study of place and place attachments has been a staple subject of enquiry in the field of Irish Studies, which ever since the emergence of an Irish ecocritical scholarship in the early 2000s has acquired a new depth. Recent publications have integrated an environmental dimension that connects literary analyses to wider cultural and global concerns such as deforestation, urban sprawl, immigration, climate change and so on. Building on the existing scholarship, the present study offers readings from modern Irish verse in the light of Ireland’s natural and cultural landscapes. Simply put, From Landscapes to Cityscapes should be viewed as a minor ecocritical exercise in Irish Studies, hoping to inspire new perspectives that arise out of an environmental scrutiny of the age-old questions of place and identity in Irish literature.

The textual analysis focuses on the works of three major Irish poets of the modern period: William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice. Contesting the often politicized and historicist boundaries set for defining Irishness and arguing for a recognition of new voices and marginal identities, this book considers a range of land/cityscapes in terms of their significance to the development of a more comprehensive view of both culture and environment in Ireland.

«A fascinating, well-paced, beautifully written memoir.»

(Professor Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Author and Director, MA in Creative Writing, University of Limerick, Ireland)

«A wonderfully honest, often witty, personal account from someone who experienced discrimination -and challenged it - at every level of academia. So much of what has changed for women in recent decades is chronicled through Pat’s life, research and actions. A tour de force.»

(Micheline Sheehy Skeffington, plant ecologist and feminist activist)

«This book evokes the lived experience of a woman who, out of her time, marshalled the brains, the courage and--I have to say it--the sheer bloody-minded and tireless determination to confront others with one question: ‘why?’. Asking the question came at no small personal cost, but--slowly and surely--it started to prise open some of the seemingly impenetrable male-centric power edifices that exist across academia; openings which now give so many others hope. Don’t be afraid of reading this book about the lifetime of someone who asked why, it may just inspire you to do the same.»

(Paul Walton, Professor of Chemistry, University of York, UK and international gender equality advocate)

This book, written by an insider, explores experiences over a 46-year career in five academic organisations in Ireland and the UK: moving from contract research assistant to full professor and line manager (Dean). Highlighting success and failure, strength and fragility, it challenges ideas about what it is to be a ‘proper' woman. It describes the subtle and relentless processes of devaluation, marginalisation and disempowerment that are often ‘normalised.’ Written in a clear accessible style, with flashes of humour, it asks whose interests are served by taken-for-granted ideas about what it is to be a woman – ideas which deny the reality of many women’s day-to-day experiences. Who wants us to think that all women find identity and satisfaction in housework and child care? Who wants us to think that universities are meritocratic institutions? The book will inspire and entertain all those who have struggled in any male-dominated organisation and wondered if they were the problem.

«Natalie Wynn has written a definitive account of Irish Jewish history in the period of mass migration at the turn of the twentieth century. She unravels the myths—such as accidental arrival from eastern Europe, or untroubled social mobility as a model minority—which have hitherto characterized Irish Jews. Community, Identity, Conflict moves from detailed studies of local communities (Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Limerick) to the metropolitan and colonial contexts of minority formation. As Dr Wynn adeptly shows, the everyday ambivalence towards minorities in Irish culture is a centuries-old history which is still present today. Her meticulous and compelling study will be of value to Irish studies, Jewish studies, and anyone interested in the life experience of refugees.»

(Bryan Cheyette, Emeritus Professor, University of Reading, and author of The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (2020))

«Natalie Wynn has produced an outstanding contribution to the relevant literature. It dismantles established myths and opens up the field of Irish Jewish studies with a fresh, innovative interpretation, which sets new standards in scholarship.»

(Eugenio Biagini, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Cambridge)

As a small community located on the peripheries of Europe and of the Jewish world, Ireland’s Jewish community is something of an outlier and is often portrayed as having a unique history or being quaint or quirky in character. This book challenges this narrative by contextualizing Irish Jewry as a community that has been defined by the experience and mythology of Jewish mass migration. This book charts the history of Ireland’s Jewish community at a time of rapid growth and cultural, political and social transition, from British rule to Irish independence, exploring the relationship between Jews, Irish society and Irish Jewish communal tradition. Key themes include arrival and settlement; the dynamics between «native» and immigrant Jews; acculturation and hybridity; intracommunal conflict; gender; and Jewish/non-Jewish relations.

The purpose of the book is to explore and explicate the origins, evolution and mobilisation of anti-war activism in Ireland from the 1950s. The author applies postcolonial critical perspectives alongside social movement theory to define the multifaceted Irish approach to different international conflicts from the creation of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (1958) to the current war in Ukraine. Meticulously researched, the chapters develop an analysis of the anti-war activism in Ireland, be it at a local, national or supranational level, from political parties, trade unions and civil associations. The book casts light on the factors that structure the Irish domestication of the conflicts under study, be they historical and connected to senses of national identity in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, or strategic, diplomatic and religious.

«This reader-friendly study of some of Ciaran Carson’s major translations provides fascinating illuminations of his techniques as a translator and author. Anne Rainey’s close readings, buoyed by selected theory, show how Carson’s aesthetics and imagination were fuelled by linguistic and cultural pluralism.»

(Dr Frank Sewell, Poet, Translator, Senior Lecturer in Irish Literature and Creative Writing at Ulster University)

«For Ciaran Carson, translation was embedded deep in his DNA. He was fascinated above all else by the shared musicality of words across languages so that translation for him was like a resonance chamber, always sounding, always musical. This book is timely and important, because it offers us a detailed and always sensitive account of how translation was not simply something that Ciaran did, but was an experience central to how he felt about and used language as a writer.»

(Professor David Johnston, Literary Translator, Professor of Translation at Queen’s University, Belfast)

Ciaran Carson viewed translation as integral to his　oeuvre.　He　imbues his version　of Dante’s acclaimed　Inferno　with modern socio-political concerns,　placing　it　in a partly Irish context, beyond any border. Like Dante, he shows his regard for vernacular speech and provides dizzying perspectives switching from courtly love language to quotidian banter. 　　

In his translation of Rimbaud, Carson completely dismantles the nineteenth-century texts before newly assembling them in translation. He employs dictionaries, musical rhythms and modern Hiberno-English slang to create Alexandrine sonnets and rhyming couplets forging Rimbaud’s　fin de siècle　French into a new cultural rendering.

Carson’s quick-witted and emotionally charged translations call for an original analytical framework. This book contributes to Translation Studies by presenting an original Hybrid Gricean Theory melding Gricean and neo-Gricean linguistic theories with pertinent translation theories to elucidate Carson’s techniques.

This study aims to uncover the traces of the celebrated Sweeney legend in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writers such as James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Austin Clarke, Derek Mahon, Tom Mac Intyre, Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Dermot Bolger, Paula Meehan, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. The tale, known in Irish as Buile Suibhne, captivates with its intricate layers of liminality. Liminality, the state of existing on the boundary, the border, the threshold, serves as the key to bringing these writers together. This liminal state is marked by the promise of a drastic shift, a metamorphosis of being. The legend’s profound impact on literary creations bears witness to the contemplation of liminality lying at the heart of the Irish imagination. Close textual readings bring to light the significance of Sweeney’s Revival, which reverberates with far-reaching and enduring resonance.