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Postcolonial
Theory in Irish Drama From 1800-2000 This
study demonstrates the practical application of postcolonial theory
to Irish drama. It argues that postcolonial tactics must evolve to
suit temporal needs, calling for re-evaluation of writers too easily
dismissed or overlooked in earlier generations. Starting with Sheridan’s
sister, Alicia LeFanu, around the Act of Union, moving to Dion Boucicault’s
comedic melodramas post-famine, then to W.B. Yeats’ romantic Celt
mythology plays, on to Brian Friel’s interrogation of nationalisms,
and finally to contemporary voices now emerging, analyses of the focus
plays and their public reception illustrates why drama, as a communally
received literate work, may more powerfully voice postcolonial concerns
than the previously privileged novel form. Dawn Duncan is Associate Professor of English at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota, and Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature. In addition to her scholarly work, Duncan remains active in the theatre as an actor and director. PRAISE
FOR THE BOOK: “Contrary
to conventional viewpoints that Irish drama did not exist before Yeats,
Lady Gregory and Synge, [this study] effectively demonstrates the
existence of an Irish dramatic tradition ranging across two centuries….Her
conclusion projects this trajectory into a future where Irish identity
will be shaped, in part at least, by writers of the Irish diaspora
and by Irish women writers. Employing sociolinguistic and postcolonial
perspectives, Professor Duncan writes in clear energetic prose.” “Professor
Duncan has written a fascinating study….While using the theories of
the postcolonialists, who examine the power of language to create
political and cultural dominance, she carves out an important place
for herself by challenging those who would exclude Irish writers from
the postcolonial grouping and its debate. By using Irish plays and
looking at the reviews of how these were received by live audiences,
Duncan is able to accurately gauge whether or not these portrayed
Irish identity….This work has been beautifully written and formatted.
It includes an excellent commendatory preface [by Michael Kenneally,
former IASIL chair] and a sufficient bibliography and index. This
work is a genuine contribution to scholarship! …Because of its contribution
to scholarship, I recommend that this book be considered for an Adele
Mellen Prize.” |
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| Poems
by Rosemarie Rowley Rowan Tree Press “Her range of vocabulary and phrasing is impressive ..a true poet….her finest poems wear their learning lightly – she excels as a critic” - Declan Kiberd “Lyrics of a rare strength and delicacy”—John McGahern |
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| A
Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor When
The Last Hurrah was published in 1956, the obscure Edwin O’Connor
(1918-1968) gained sudden wealth and fame with his elegiac novel about
a veteran political campaigner. Six years later O’Connor’s intimate
portrait of a recovered alcoholic priest in The Edge of Sadness won
a Pulitzer Prize. The different worlds of these two novels highlight
a striking contrast in their author. O’Connor was a witty, affable
man with many devoted friends, from a president to street eccentrics.
Yet, he was an intensely private man. For this biography, the first
to be written of Edwin O’Connor, Charles F. Duffy interviewed O’Connor’s
family, friends, and associates. He also investigated O’Connor’s worlds
in Rhode Island, Notre Dame, Boston, Dublin, and Wellfleet. In addition,
he makes the most extensive use to date of the Edwin O’Connor Papers,
a valuable collection containing many unpublished works. A
Family of His Own covers O’Connor’s comfortable upbringing in
Rhode Island, his formation at Notre Dame, his obscure years in radio
and the Coast Guard during World War II, his adoption of Boston, his
long association with his publishers at Atlantic Monthly and Little,
Brown and Company, his toil in journalism and television reviewing,
his several sojourns in Ireland, and his extraordinary dedication
to his craft while living close to poverty. For the years after The
Last Hurrah, Duffy examines O’Connor’s handling of newfound wealth
and celebrity, his growing loneliness, the surprise and fulfillment
of a late marriage, his failure on Broadway, and his return to fiction.
Throughout his writing O’Connor’s major subject was the family, especially
the gains, losses, and conflicts within assimilated Irish America.
Duffy examines the complex ways by which O’Connor’s own experience
of family and friendship formed essential patterns in his works. Charles F. Duffy is Professor of English at Providence College in Rhode Island. His major fields of study are Modern British and Irish Literature. He is former chair of the department and former director of the Humanities Program. PRAISE
FOR THE BOOK: “Edwin
O’Connor was a premier author in his day. This lovely book tells how
and why, and remembers a major literary figure of the last century.” “Edwin
O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah is the most acute, hilarious, and vivid
American political novel of the twentieth century; and Charles F.
Duffy’s thoughtful biography renews the memory of Edwin O’Connor,
that witty and elegant man, and illuminates the dilemmas of Irish
American writers coming to terms with American society.” |
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Shaun Richards, The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Irish Drama Cambridge, 300 pages | ISBN: 0521008735 The essays in this collection cover the whole range of Irish drama from late nineteenth-century melodrama to contemporary writing. Individual studies of Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, Shaw, Wilde, and O’Casey are included, as are discussions of contemporary playwrights such as Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Frank McGuiness, Sebastian Barry, Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr. The collection examines the relationship between the theatre and its political context as this is inflected through its ideology, staging and programming. It also includes a full chronology and bibliography. Among the contributors are IASIL Members Shaun Richards, Richard Allen Cave, Neil Sammells, John P. Harrington, Helen Lojek, Marilynn Richtarik, Nicholas Grene, and Vic Merriman More on the Cambridge University Press website |
| Murphy,
Neil Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt“ An Analysis of the Epistemological
Crisis in Modern Irish Fiction This study situates Aidan Higgins, John Banville and Neil Jordan in the context of Modernist and Postmodernist literature. In order to map how these writers respond to the problems of epistemological doubt, their work is positioned beside that of other writers like Rushdie, Nabokov, Calvino, Garcia-Marquez and Robbe-Grillet. In addition, the opening chapter outlines a working position on the meaning and significance of Postmodernism, as it pertains to literary fiction, with particular reference to the work of Brian McHale, Ihab Hassan, Patricia Waugh, David Harvey, Richard Kearney and David Lodge. Although firmly rooted in Irish literary studies, this work represents a departure from recent critical work in Irish literature in that it seeks, responding to the specificity of the fictionalized concerns of these writers, to contextualize the fictions of Higgins, Banville and Jordan within Irish and international literary traditions, rather than in an Irish historical or political framework. Full details are on the Mellen Press website |
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| The
Irish Revival Reappraised New from Four Courts Press, The Irish Revival Reappraised collects the proceedings of the tenth international conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland. It contains essays on the Literary Revival, the Gaelic League, and the other cultural and social movements that emerged from the 1880s to the 1920s. It includes essays on many literary figures, including Yeats, AE, Synge and O'Casey. Also included are essays on lesser-known figures such Robert as Robert Lynd, Thomas Rolleston, Joseph Campbell and others. Essays consider a variety of issues, including American influence on the Gaelic League, Music Education in the Celtic Revival, cultural nationalism in Ulster, theosophy and archaeology. Contributors include IASIL Members Lucy McDiarmid, Alex Davis, Michael McAteer, Mary Burke and Patrick Lonergan. More information on the Four Courts Press and SSNCI websites.
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| Violence
and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf Employing
Northrop Frye and René Girard as his theoretical foundation,
Johnsen reinterprets the works of three canonical modernists--Ibsen,
Joyce, and Woolf--to argue for their commitment to analyzing collective
violence as a defining motive in literary modernism. Johnsen shows
how Frye’s vision of a movement from mythic to ironic heroes parallels
Girard’s view of a society increasingly demythologized, and increasingly
concerned with scapegoats and victims. He points to important similarities
between these theoretical visions and a growing concern for weaker
subjects across literary history, especially with the move into the
modern period. Ibsen, Joyce, and Woolf, he argues, each wrestled with
the powerful rituals of self-sacrifice that society requires in the
modern world—with their strategies and consequences. Using
this focus, Johnsen addresses Ibsen’s controversial criticism of the
democratic majority, Joyce’s inflammatory rejection of physical-force
nationalism, and Woolf’s curious refusal of feminist anger as kindred
responses to modern affirmations of collective violence, not merely
paralleling the insights of Frye and Girard but extending and refining
them. “A unique and important book. Our understanding of literary modernism, which we think we know so well, is transformed by these analyses of the anthropological insights that it holds for readers.”—Andrew J. McKenna, Loyola University |
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Critical
Anthology for the Study of Modern Irish Literature |
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| Six
Essays On Edward Martyn (1859-1923), Irish Cultural Nationalist By Jerry Nolan Edwin Mellen Press ISBN: 0-7734-6492-1 “The great virtue of Jerry Nolan's work on Edward Martyn is that it rescues Martyn from his usual role as a bit player in the Irish Literary Renaissance and allows him to appear as the dedicated multi-facted character he was, one who cultural work for Ireland has hitherto not received the credit it is due. Nolan's book is a fine piece of scholarship, informed by great enthusiasm for its subject.”—Terence Brown, Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, Trinity College, Dublin. TheTulira Trilogy of Edward Martyn (1859-1923), Irish
Symbolist Dramatist, |
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Representing
the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction A comprehensive
examination of Irish short stories written over the last eighty years
that have treated the Troubles. Read chronologically, the stories
provide insightful perspectives on the Troubles, from the 1916 Easter
Rising to the recent sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. The book
demonstrates how Irish writers have embraced a variety of literary
modes and techniques in order to track the varied and changing attitudes
of the Irish toward every aspect of the Troubles, including revolution,
violence, sectarianism, terrorism, and identity-thinking. |
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Contexts
for Frank McGuinness's Drama "Beautifully
written, meticulously researched and informed by a |
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Thomas
Davis and Ireland This
intriguing narrative examines the principal events of Thomas Davis’s
life and work, discusses his role in the evolution of Irish nationalism,
and reveals his importance to generations of nationalists. |
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| Un’irlandese
a Torino: Lady Morgan Donatella Abbate Badin, Trauben 2003. 12 € This volume contains a 78 page introduction (in Italian) on Lady Morgan as a travel-writer and the translation into Italian of chapters 2, 3, and 4 of her Italy (1821), which concern her travels through Piedmont and her stay in Turin, then the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia and future capital of Italy. Surprisingly Lady Morgan’s Italy had never been translated into Italian although among the many travel accounts written in the 18th and 19th centuries, it is one of the most sympathetic to the country and its people. The book is full of perceptive insights into the political situation of Italy after the Napoleonic wars, the role of England in Restoration Europe, and the plight of a woman traveller with a Jacobin disposition. It suggests interesting parallelisms with Ireland and is rich in amusing anecdotes about the social and literary life of the age. Un’irlandese a Torino is the first volume of a project of the University of Turin in which the next step is to publish an abridged Italian edition of Italy and, eventually, an abridged English edition; both, of course, with a full academic introduction. |
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Irish
Political Economy, 4 volumes Volume
I: pp. xxi+358; volume II: pp. vi+313; volume III: pp. vi+354; volume
IV: pp. viii+443. This anthology, edited by Professor Tom Boylan, Department of Economics and Professor Tadhg Foley, Department of English (both of NUI, Galway), is the first of its kind to reproduce some of the most significant writings on political economy in nineteenth-century Ireland. Though the Irish were seen, and often saw themselves, as allergic to ideas, these volumes provide abundant evidence of both extensive and intensive Irish contributions to economic thought. Indeed as Dr Tom Duddy of the Department of Philosophy, NUI, Galway has eloquently and convincingly shown in his recently-published History of Irish Thought, the Irish have made outstanding, if largely unnoticed, contributions to philosophical thinking. Volume
I of Irish Political Economy deals with the scope and methodology
of the subject, volume II with the theory of value and distribution,
while volume III covers public finance, money and banking, and international
trade. The final volume reprints material on such topics as laissez-faire,
population, emigration and colonization, poor law, absenteeism, slavery,
gender, and education. Among the authors reproduced in this anthology
are Isaac Butt, Archbishop Richard Whately, John Elliot Cairnes, John
Kells Ingram, Cliffe Leslie, W.E. Hearn, Charles F. Bastable, Francis
Y. Edgeworth, Mountifort Longfield, and Robert Torrens. |
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