IASIL Online Newsletter, 2009-2010

Paula Meehan: Special Issue
An Sionnach 5.1 & 5.2 (Bealtaine/Spring and Samhain/Fall 2009)
Guest editor: Jody Allen Randolph

Julia Kavanagh was a popular and internationally published writer of the mid-nineteenth century whose collective body of work included fiction, biography, critical studies of French and English women writers, and travel writing. In this critically engaged study Eileen Fauset sees Kavanagh as a significant but neglected writer and returns her to her proper place in the history of women's writing.

With few known primary sources to go on the author manages, through her skilful selection of letters, official documents and historical commentary, to piece together some of the jigsaw of Kavanagh's life. Throughout this study, the biographical element informs and directs discussion of Kavanagh's writing itself. What emerges is a succinct and telling portrait of a woman who, through a desire to write, acquired both economic independence and a means through which she could voice her sexual politics. Eileen Fauset challenges the historical attitudes to 'popular romance', a genre read mainly by women and generally discounted as simple entertainment. She argues that in Kavanagh's novels romance is often the pivot around which issues of cultural and sexual difference are examined, a perspective that, invariably, also informed Kavanagh's non-fiction.

This study addresses the current enthusiasm for the reclamation of neglected women writers and also brings to light interesting material that might otherwise have remained unknown to the specialist. It will appeal to academics, students and enthusiasts of Victorian literature and women's writing.

Eileen Fauset was formerly a Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds, Bretton Hall Campus and has published extensively on Irish and British women’s writing

Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800-1922 by Mark Mossman

Ireland and disability are rarely put together, but in this book Mark Mossman claims that the notion of disability is actually central in the development of modern Ireland. Moving from Jonathan Swift's pornographic poetry to Oscar Wilde's cello coat, from Sydney Owenson's wild Irish girl to Bram Stoker's gothic and obsessive vampires, Mossman ranges through modern Irish literary history, providing close, detailed accounts of such works while simultaneously establishing a new critical perspective on a modernized Irish culture and identity. From that perspective he reveals the ways in which Ireland can be articulated as a disabled space-- disabled in negative terms by British policy makers and disabled in transformative, often visionary terms, by Irish writers of the modern period.

Mark Mossman is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University.

Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, An Athbheochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa by Brian Ó Conchubhair
Cló Iar-Chonnachta, 2009
ISBN 9781905560462,
Pb €20.00

Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, An Athbheochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa is an intellectual history of the Irish Language Revival. Exploring fin de siècle themes including Darwinism, degeneration, racial hybridity, race extermination, cultural decline and cultural nationalism as manifested in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, this ground-breaking study charts how these concerns created a cultural and intellectual environment receptive to the Irish revival of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing on new material from newspapers such as the New York Times, An Claidheamh Soluis, Fáinne an Lae and Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge, it investigates the impact of contemporary European debates on issues such as grammar, orthography, dialect, fonts, cultural criticism and literary production.

Is saothar ceannródaíoch é Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge a dhéanann mionléamh íogair, idirdhisciplíneach ar stair intleachtúil dhioscúrsa na Gaeilge sa tréimhse sin idir deireadh an naoú haois déag agus tús an fichú haois ar a dtugtar an fin de siècle. Mínítear anseo an chaoi a ndeachaigh an fin de siècle Eorpach i bhfeidhm go smior ar Athbheochan na Gaeilge agus an chaoi ar mhúnlaigh tuiscintí conspóideacha Charles Darwin idir idé-eolaíocht, chultúr, theanga agus litríocht í. Tugtar mórthéamaí na linne - meathlú, díothú ciníocha, meascadh agus truailliú fola agus cros-síolrú - chun solais i dtéarmaí na Gaeilge trí anailís a dhéanamh ar chonspóidí móra na hAthbheochana: an cló, na canúintí, an litriú, an ghramadach agus an t-úrscéal. Ghnóthaigh an leabhar seo an chéad duais do shaothar próis i gComórtas an Oireachtais 2009, maoinithe ag Oireachtas na Gaeilge.

Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness by Emilie Morin

Palgrave Macmillan
Hardback
22 Oct 2009 £50.00
9780230219861

Samuel Beckett's bilingual oeuvre has been approached from many angles, most of which stress its autonomy from understandings of Irishness emerging from the Irish Literary Revival. Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials, Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness shows that such autonomy is only apparent, and that Beckett's avant-garde practices remain bound to the exigencies that governed their very development, his writing bearing the mark of an ongoing attempt to distance itself from an Irish literary legacy. In a timely fashion, Emilie Morin defines historical and theoretical frameworks within which Beckett's relationship to Ireland can be understood, relating Beckett's ambivalent response to the Revival to post-war philosophical debates about the European avant-garde. She illustrates an important correlation between the ways in which Beckett’s texts engage and resist the historical moments that govern their generation, and the complexities of form and method which characterise their anti-essentialist aspirations.

Reviews:
' Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness deftly brings together scholarly erudition with theoretical sophistication in a strikingly original and judicious manner. Particularly impressive is the book's international reach, demonstrating an alertness to French and European contexts as well as the Irish one.'

- Ronan McDonald, Department of English and American Literature, University of
Reading, UK

EMILIE MORIN is Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the
University of York, UK.

Music in Irish Cultural History ( Dublin: Irish Academic Press) by Gerry Smyth

With chapters ranging from the politics of betrayal in the songs of Thomas Moore to the use of music in the award-winning film Once, Music in Irish Cultural History offers an analysis of key moments from Irish cultural history considered from the perspective of music.

Introduction: In Search of Irish Music
1 Listening to the Future: Music and Irish Studies
2 Betrayal as Theme and Influence in Thomas Moore’s ‘On Music’
3 Music in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: Sources, Contexts, Meanings
4 Paddy Sad and Paddy Mad: Music and the Condition of Irishness
5 Bringing it all Back Home? The Dynamics of Local Music-Making in The Commitments
6 Celtic Music: From the Margins to the Centre (And Back Again?)
7 Listening to the Novel: The Role and Representation of Traditional Music in Contemporary Irish Fiction
8 No Country for Young Women: Celtic Music, Dissent and the Irish Female Body
9 ‘The same sound but with a different meaning’: Music, Politics and Identity in Bernard Mac Laverty’s Grace Notes
10 ‘Sing your melody, I’ll sing along’: Mimetic and Diegetic Uses of Music in Once

Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey - Benjamin Keatinge and Aengus Woods (Eds)
Foreword by Augustus Young
Afterword by John Coffey
October 2009 304 pages illus 978 0 71652 910 1 cloth €39.95 / £40.00 / $69.95

This new volume of essays provides a critical re-evaluation of Brian Coffey (1905−1995), a leading figure in Ireland's post-Independence poetic avant garde. With contributions from younger scholars as well as veteran Coffey commentators, the book casts new light on one of the most fascinating yet least understood figures in twentieth-century Irish letters. Philosopher, scientist, friend of Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin and Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey's writing career spanned six decades, two continents and a vast range of interests and influences.

Offering a comprehensive re-assessment of his poetic achievement, the collection seeks to situate Coffey as a distinctive and original voice in Irish poetry whose influence and importance has been overlooked. It also reveals the poet's complex negotiations with Irish identity, Catholicism and his own condition of unwilling exile. The contributors consider Coffey within broader cultural contexts, examining his collaborations with S.W. Hayter, his activities as a small press publisher and his position as exemplar for a later generation of Irish and British poets impatient with mainstream poetics. These critical essays are interspersed with a number of personal reflections by friends and family of the poet providing an intimate portrait of this enigmatic writer. Throughout, the collection displays Brian Coffey as a powerful poet, a profound thinker and a tireless advocate of the work of others, one with a clear vision of what poetry is and what it can be.

CONTEMPORARY IRISH DRAMA, 2nd edition by Anthony Roche
Publication date: 30th July 2009
ISBN: Hardback - 978-0-230-21978-6; Paperback - 978-0-230-21979-3
Price: Hardback - £60; Paperback - £18.99

A revised and updated version of this pioneering study covers the extraordinary revival of Irish drama in the second half of the twentieth century. By comparing the theatre of Samuel Beckett to more culturally specific Irish plays, the book establishes a greater international and theatrically experimental context for the field than has been recognised. Its three central chapters offer close and contextualised readings of the careers of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy across a span of more than four decades. The drama of Northern Ireland and its theatrical response to political violence receives sustained attention through a wide range of playwrights, including Frank McGuinness, Gary Mitchell, Christina Reid and Anne Devlin. A new chapter considers the work of such younger playwrights as Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr who emerged in the 1990s to probe the shortcomings of the 'Celtic Tiger' phenomenon. The book draws on significant productions of the period and will prove invaluable for students and theatregoers alike.

'Professor Roche's new edition of his book allows him to add a fascinating survey of the drama of the Celtic Tiger period. In this he convincingly highlights how a younger generation of playwrights engages with the Irish dramatic tradition as it reveals in its haunted plays the tragic flaws in Irish society that mere prosperity could not overcome.' - Terence Brown, Trinity College, University of Dublin

'Anthony Roche's Contemporary Irish Drama was a fundamental text in the study of modern drama; this revised edition with additions and updates proves its validity, value, and relevance. The strengths of the first edition – original close readings, judicious contextualizing, comprehensive references – are now complemented with definitive accounts of the most exciting young playwrights and their prospects in national and international 21st-century culture.' - John P. Harrington, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, USA

'Anthony Roche loves theatre, and Irish theatre in particular - he was at the opening nights; he has long known the playwrights, directors, and actors, as people and professionals; he has been in the scholarly debate about contemporary drama in Ireland all the way along. His new edition of this groundbreaking study really puts the reader on top of the subject, and up to date on many of the most successful English-speaking plays of recent times.' - Adrian Frazier, National University of Ireland, Galway

ANTHONY ROCHE is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has published widely in the field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish drama and theatre. His recent publications include The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (2006).

The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama: W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge By George Cusack
Series: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
List Price: $95.00
ISBN: 978-0-415-99003-5
Binding: Hardback
Published by: Routledge
Publication Date: 03/06/2009
Pages: 210

This study examines the early dramatic works of Yeats, Synge, and Gregory in the context of late colonial Ireland’s unique socio-political landscape. By contextualizing each author’s work within the artistic and political discourses of their time, Cusack demonstrates the complex negotiation of nationalism, class, and gender identities undertaken by these three authors in the years leading up to Ireland’s revolution against England. Furthermore, by focusing on plays written by each author in the context of the ongoing debates over Irish national identity that were taking place throughout Irish public life in this period, Cusack examines in more depth than previous studies the ways Yeats, Gregory, and Synge adapted conventional dramatic and linguistic forms to accommodate the conflicting claims of Irish nationalism. In so doing, he demonstrates the contribution these authors made not only to the development of Irish nationalism but also to modern and postcolonial literature as we understand them today.

Literary and Cultural Relations between Ireland and Hungary and Central and Eastern Europe by Maria Kurdi

This lively, informative and incisive collection of essays sheds fascinating new light on the literary interrelations between Ireland, Hungary, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic. It charts a hitherto under-explored history of the reception of modern Irish culture in Central and Eastern Europe and also investigates how key authors have been translated, performed and adapted. The work of Jonathan Swift, John Millington Synge, Flann O'Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Martin McDonagh, it is indicated, has particularly inspired writers, directors and translators.

The searching analyses presented here illuminatingly reflect on the far-reaching political and social import of multicultural exchange. It is shown to be a process that is at best mutually defining and that raises questions about received forms of identity, the semiotics of genre and the possibilities and limits of linguistic translation. In addition, the histories compiled here of critical commentary on Irish literature in Hungary or of the staging of contemporary Irish plays in Hungary and in the Czech Republic, for example, uncover the haphazardness of inter-cultural exchange and the extent to which it is vulnerable to political ideology, social fashion and the vagaries of state funding. The revealing explorations undertaken in this volume of a wide array of Irish dramatic and literary texts, ranging from Gulliver's Travels to Translations and The Pillowman, tease out the subtly altered nuances that they acquire in a Central European context.

By the same token, it is demonstrated that Ireland has been changed by the recent migration of workers from Eastern Europe and that consequently projections of the figure of the emigrant or asylum seeker in current drama warrant scrutiny. This original and combative collection demonstrates, not only that literary exchange between Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and Ireland has been prolonged, multifaceted and, above all, enriching, but also that it exposes blind-spots and forces confrontation with issues of racism, failure of empathy and cultural misprision. Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin

Making Ireland Roman:Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters edited by Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell
(ISBN 978 185918 453 0, Hbk, 254 pp, 234 x 156mm, €49/£45.00).

This collection of articles by leading scholars focuses on Irish writing in Latin in the Renaissance and aims to rewrite Irish cultural history through recovery and analysis of Latin sources. This book renders accessible for the first time the vastly important Irish contribution to the counter-reformation, to European Renaissance and baroque literature in Latin and to the intellectual culture of European Latinity. The ethnic, cultural and religious divisions within Ireland produced a divided Latin writing and reading community.

The Latin language became the medium in which the Catholic Church operated. When Christianity took root in Ireland so too did Latin. It became one of the principal languages of Ireland for over a thousand years resulting in over one thousand books being published by Irish authors. In order to convey the idiosyncrasies of Gaelic culture in the language of European scholarship to an international audience, Irish authors had to engage in a process of cultural translation. Many were Catholic exiles who attempted to promote an alternative to the English colonial narrative being written by domestic scholars. Some writers felt compelled to defend their country's reputation as a result of defamatory comments made by other writers.

Articles include a detailed reconstruction of a feud with Scottish historians about the identity of medieval 'Scotia' as they claimed that it referred to Scotland rather than Ireland. Other articles include a contextual study of the political epic poem 'Ormonius', an examination of the major Latinist Richard Stanihurst and an evaluation of the literature of Catholic exile.

Jason Harris is in the Department of History at University College Cork and Keith Sidwell is in the Department of Classics, University College Cork

An Introduction to Early Irish Literature by Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin
240pp; 16 pp colour ills section. August 2009
ISBN:
978-1-84682-177-6
Catalogue Price: €24.95
Web Price: €22.45
http://www.fourcourtspress.ie/product.php?intProductID=871

This book discusses the rich written heritage of the Old and Middle Irish period, 600 – 1200, and is suitable for students of medieval Ireland as well as the general reader who wants to learn about the stories, poetry and themes of early Irish literature. Early chapters deal with the poets, druids, monks, the beginnings of writing manuscripts as well as an introduction to each of the saga cycles.

These sagas contain the stories of heroes such as Cú Chulainn and Finn mac Cumaill as well as kings, such as Cormac mac Airt. Further chapters focus on the poets and their poetry, the heroes visiting the Otherworld, the births and deaths of famous heroes as well as stories about kings, kingship and sovereignty goddesses.

Included also is a bibliography and a comprehensive index including personal and place names.

Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin has taught medieval Irish literature and history for 25 years at NUI Maynooth

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To ease comparison and evaluation of references, each chapter addresses how to choose and utilize research methods and tools to yield the most relevant information. This guide also examines the strengths and weaknesses of core and specialized electronic and print research tools and standard search techniques and-when appropriate-covers the historical and cultural contexts and usability issues of unique reference sources. This volume, number 5 in the series, raises trenchant issues in Irish literary scholarship, such as the problem of defining what Irish literature is; gaps in criticism and secondary literature devoted to Irish literature; neglected areas of scholarly inquiry, including Irish literature by women and lesser-known writers; and the rewards of interdisciplinary research. It concludes with a brief consideration of a scenario illustrating how a scholar might use strategies and sources covered in the text to solve a research problem.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. Greg Matthews is a Cataloging Librarian at the Washington State University Libraries.

Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist by Keith Hopper Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, completed in 1940, was initially rejected by his publishers for being ‘too fantastic’, and only appeared posthumously in 1967. Since then O’Brien has achieved cult status, although critical appraisal of his work has focused almost exclusively on his first novel, At Swim Two Birds (1939). By 1940 O’Brien was confronted with two towering traditions: the jaded legacy of Yeats’s Celtic Twilight and the problematic complexities of Joyce’s modernism. With The Third Policeman O’Brien forges a powerful synthesis between these two traditions, and the paraliterary path he chooses marks the historical transition from modernism to post-modernism.

This groundbreaking study, first published in 1995 and now substantially revised, reconfigures O’Brien as a highly subversive writer within a rich and fertile literary landscape: indisputably Irish yet distinctly post-modern. It identifies The Third Policeman as a subversive intellectual satire, in the cutting-edge tradition of Swift and Sterne, and situates it as one of the earliest – and most exciting – examples of post-modernist fiction. ‘Hopper makes his point with enviable ingenuity and pervasive force. He wears his stupendous erudition and expertise lightly and writes in a style that is sheer delight. […] Hopper has managed that rarest of feats: a scientific study from which both the expert and the layman can profit copiously’. (Rüdiger Imhof, Irish Times)

The Natural History of Ireland by Philip O’Sullivan Beare translated and edited by Denis C. O’Sullivan

The Natural History of Ireland by Philip O’Sullivan Beare (c.1590 – 1660) is an important source of the history of Ireland’s natural environment and its political history. It was originally written in Latin by Don Philip O’Sullivan Beara, an Irish nobleman living in exile in Spain, and formed part of his Zoilomastix (1625). O’Sullivan Beare wrote the Zoilomastix in order to refute the Topographia Hiberniae of Giraldus Cambrensis, which was very derogatory of Ireland and the Irish people. The Topograhia was still the accepted text on Ireland in the seventeenth century which angered Philip O’Sullivan as it contained so many inaccuracies in its description of Ireland. Book One of the Zoilomastix highlights his reaction to these propagandist texts denigrating Ireland and comments on the natural habitat and features, such as rivers, plants, animals, fish and birds, of Ireland. Species listed are named in four languages, including Irish. An introduction by Denis O’Sullivan gives an overall history of the O’Sullivans and Philip in particular.

This book has never been translated into English before, thus making this a unique publication. This translation is both faithful to the original and accessible to the general reader. The ability to deal with a complex, multilingual manuscript of this kind is now rare and it is to the credit of Dr O’Sullivan that this is such a readable edition of the text. This translation constitutes an important contribution to scholarship pertaining to O’Sullivan Beare, early modern Irish Latin literature and Irish history in general and will be of interest to historians of science as well as the broad group of historians of early modern Ireland and the connections with Europe of the time. Denis C. O’Sullivan was a consultant urologist at Cork University Hospital and the Bon Secours Hospital in Cork and a Clinical Lecturer in Urology at University College Cork. He graduated in Ancient Classics from University College Cork. Further details on www.corkuniversitypress.com BACK TO TOP

Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives published by Cork University Press Edited by Susan Osborn

Recently, Elizabeth Bowen has been recognised as being as radically important to our understanding of twentieth-century literature as Samuel Beckett and she is now considered among the most highly significant writers of the twentieth century. This is the first critical collection of essays devoted solely to Bowen’s work and it is intended to broaden the critical framework of Bowen scholarship and to extend Bowen criticism by more clearly mapping her works’ position in relation to contemporary critical concerns and its location in relation to twentieth-century literature generally.

1. Unstable compounds: Bowen¹s Beckettian affinities - Sinéad Mooney 2. How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees: the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September - Susan Osborn 3. Dead letters and living things: historical ethics in The House in Parisand The Death of the Heart - Eluned Summers-Bremner 4. Mumbo-jumbo: the haunted world of The Little Girls - June Sturrock 5. She-ward bound: Elizabeth Bowen as a sensationalist writer - Shannon Wells-Lassagne 6. Territory, space, modernity: Elizabeth Bowen¹s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and wartime London - Shafquat Towheed 7. Narrative, meaning and agency in The Heat of the Day - Brook Miller, with Luke Elward, TessaHempel and Philip Kollar

Susan Osborn is a critic, novelist, and poet who lectures in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

A History of the Irish Short Story by Heather Ingman
Hardback (ISBN-13: 9780521867245)
Published May 2009
£50.00

Though the short story is often regarded as central to the Irish canon, this is the first comprehensive study of the genre for many years. Heather Ingman traces the development of the modern short story in Ireland from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Her study analyses the material circumstances surrounding publication, examining the role of magazines and editors in shaping the form. Ingman incorporates the most recent critical thinking on the short story, traces international connections, and gives a central part to Irish women’s short stories. Each chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of key stories from the period discussed, featuring Joyce, Edna O’Brien and John McGahern, among others. With its comprehensive bibliography and biographies of authors, this volume will be a key work of reference for scholars and students both of Irish fiction and of the modern short story as a genre.

• An overview of the development of a genre in its historical context
• Detailed readings of Joyce, McGahern, Yeats, O’Brien and many others
• Includes concise biographies of key authors and a critical bibliography

Contents
1. Introduction; 2. The nineteenth century: nation and short story in the making; Readings: William Carleton and Emily Lawless; 3. Fin de siècle visions: Irish short fiction at the turn of the century; Readings: W. B. Yeats and George Egerton; 4. The modern Irish short story: Moore and Joyce; Readings: James Joyce; 5. 1920-39: years of transition; Readings: Frank O'Connor and Norah Hoult; 6. 1940-1959: isolation; Readings: Mary Lavin and Sean O'Faolain; 7. 1960-1979: time, memory and imagination; Readings: William Trevor and Edna
O'Brien; 8. 1980 to the present: changing identities; Readings: John McGahern and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne; Biographical glossary; Bibliographic essay.

THE QUIET MAN … AND BEYOND Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland
Edited by Seán Crosson and Rod Stoneman
€22.95 paperback June 2009 ISBN 978-1-905785-56-8

In 1996, The Quiet Man topped an Irish Times poll for the best Irish film of all time. Almost ten years later, with many more Irish (and Irish-themed) films made, The Quiet Man still occupied number four in a poll of 10,000 people across Ireland. John Ford’s greatest commercial success, the film also set a template for Ireland’s representation, and promotion, for over half a century.

This book, The Quiet Man … and Beyond, involves both critical analysis of aspects of The Quiet Man as myth, commodity and fetish and the celebration of a film that has sustained considerable academic attention and popular appreciation since its release in 1952. Among the topics considered are the complexity of the film’s relation to Ireland, to Irish literature and to John Ford’s other films; its perceived place with regard to indigenous Irish cinema and the representation of women; and the phenomenon of its circulation and reception as a cult film over the years.

Contributors include Luke Gibbons, John Hill, Ruth Barton, James P. Byrne, Seán Crosson, Fidelma Farley, Roddy Flynn, Adrian Frazier, Michael Patrick Gillespie, Conor Groome, Des MacHale, Barry Monahan, Brian Ó Conchubhair, Díóg O’Connell, Caitríona Ó Torna, Tom Paulus, Sean Ryder, Eamonn Slater and Rod Stoneman.

Seán Crosson is a lecturer on Irish and world cinema with the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway where he is Programme Coordinator of the MA in Film Studies. Rod Stoneman is the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media and was formerly Chief Executive with Bord Scannán na hÉireann/The Irish Film Board.

Place and Memory in the New Ireland
Ed. Britta Olinder and Werner Huber
Trier : WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009 (Irish Studies in Europe; vol. 2) ISBN 978-3-86821-146-7

Re-Imagining the Imaginary: A Challenge to Revisionist Mythology (Kerby A. Miller) – Reconstructed Memory: Irish Emigrant Letters from the Americas (Graham Davis) – Urban Regeneration in Belfast: Landscape and Memory (Valérie Peyronel) – Anticipating the Peace Process: In the Name of the Father as a Myth-Breaking Message (Yann Bévant) – Irish Animation and Radical Memory (Tom Walsh) – Two Poems (Harry Clifton) – “Chipped and tilted Marys”: Two Irish Poets and Their Contemporary Contexts (Patricia Coughlan) – “Watch me wherever I go”: Ambivalence and Misdirection in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s Poetry (Borbala Faragó) – “Out-and-out weary of excavating in the past”: The New Irelands of Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Dennis O’Driscoll (Mary Pierse) – from Authenticity, Chapter Thirty-Five (Deirdre Madden) – Place, Time and Perspective in John McGahern’s Fiction (Martin Ryle) – Mammies, Trollops, and Re-Claimers of the Night: Women in Patrick McCabe’s Fiction (David Clark ) – Here and Then, There and Now: Place and Memory in Éilís Ní Duibhne’s Fiction (Giovanna Tallone) – Frank McGuinness and Armand Gatti: Plays of Memory and Survival (Joseph Long)

Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics
Michael Cavanagh
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8132-1671-3, $59.95
xv, 254 pages
Publication date: June 10, 2009

The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to announce publication of Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney’s Poetics by Michael Cavanagh.

Nobel Prize winning Irish writer Seamus Heaney has been an ambitious critic as well as poet, publishing five books of literary criticism in the four decades of his career. This book surveys his critical essays, setting forth Heaney’s poetics—his concept of what poetry should be and what its uses are—and relating them to his practice as a poet.

The first full-length study of Heaney’s poetics, Professing Poetry explores Heaney’s unusual concept of influence and the various ways in which Heaney interacts with other writers. It shows how Heaney, writing brilliantly about others, establishes quiet partnerships with them. It shows as well how he sometimes resists writers, sometimes misrepresenting them and even himself in the process. The book returns frequently to Heaney’s anxiety about poetry’s justification, to his wariness of the politicizing of poetry, and to his spirited and eloquent defense of what he calls poetry’s “redress.” Heaney wants to “make sense” of poetry in the context of the modern world, but he feels the pull of contradictory opinions. Poetry, he sometimes thinks, should immerse us in the world. At other times Heaney thinks it redeems us by putting us at a distance from the world.

Professing Poetry aspires to a simple language described by Heaney in Finders Keepers as one in which “there will be no gap between the professional idiom and the personal recognition.” The study considers Heaney’s relations with Robert Lowell, Dante, Philip Larkin, Patrick Kavanagh, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, and others.

Michael Cavanagh is Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College.

“Michael Cavanagh’s Professing Poetry accomplishes the laudable task showing for the first time how pervasively and complexly the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s critical work has been informed by the majestic shades of the poet’s personal canon, and how much in turn they have helped to shape the evolution of his poetry. This book, at once astute, readable, and well organized, is a significant contribution to the field of Heaney studies.”—Daniel Tobin, Professor and Chair of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, Emerson College

“Cavanagh knows Heaney’s criticism and poetry inside-and-out, and he does an admirable job of discussing the influence of other writers on Heaney’s poetry and criticism. While numerous critical studies of Heaney exist, Cavanagh’s book is the first to bring Heaney’s essays out from the wings to center stage.”—Henry Hart, The College of William and Mary

“Cavanagh’s elegant yet plain-spoken parsing of Seamus Heaney’s prose in defense of poetry, and of poets, puts Cavanagh into the fine company of the leading American scholars of Heaney’s poetry—Rand Brandes, Henry Hart, Helen Vendler, and Daniel Tobin. In Professing Poetry, Cavanagh empathetically explores Heaney’s wavering confidences in the poets who have shaped our reading life in the twentieth century. Never doctrinaire or pretentious, Cavanagh’s chapters read and reread Heaney’s essays remaining mindful, as Heaney always does, that their assurances and affiliations point us toward understanding the services and satisfactions of poetry and, in particular, of Heaney’s poetry.”—Thomas Dillon Redshaw, Editor Emeritus, New Hibernia Review

"A notable strength of the collection is its interrogation of 'the body' - whether politicized, sexualized, gendered, disciplined, or liberated." Prof Margaret Kelleher National University of Ireland

". . . as a snapshot of the critical interests of some of the most perceptive and active young scholars in Ireland today, this collection prefigures the directions in which critical debate in the humanities may be expected to go in future years." Prof Christopher Morash National University of Ireland

Table of Contents
Foreword by Prof. Moynagh Sullivan

Section I: Exploring Sexuality and Corporeality
“I am unable even / To contain myself”: The Maternal Threshold of Subjectivity in Medbh McGuckian’s The Flower and Other Poems – Niamh Hehir
“My Form is Epicene”: Sexual Ambiguity in the Poetry of Richard Murphy – Ben Keatinge
Bodies on Samuel Beckett’s Fiction and Drama – Anne Markey
The Journal Urania: An Alternative Archive of Radical Gender Masquerade – Sonja Tiernan
Experiential Ekphrasis in Eva Bourke’s “Letter to Sujata” – Megan Buckley

Section II: Discourses of Sexuality and Irishness
The “Unmarried Mother” and Moral Politics in the Free State: Developing a Political Narrative for the History of Sexuality in Ireland – Michael G. Cronin
Irish Confessional Discourse in Kate O’Brien’s Novels – Catherine Smith
Sexuality and Religion in Kate O’Brien’s Fiction - Sharon Tighe-Mooney
“The Erotic Highstyle”: Self-Reflexivity and Performativity in Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street and Ripley Bogle – Caroline Magennis

Section III: Surveying Sexuality and Gender in Sport, in Song and on Screen
“French Letters”: The Space of the HIV body in Irish Television Broadcasting in the mid-1980s – Deidre Quinn
“He Sees His Own Face Reflected”: Representations of Eamon de Valera in the Fiction and Films of Neil Jordan – Val Nolan
Masculinity, Victimization and the Recuperation of Authority in InterMission – Fintan Walsh
The Body in Pedro Almodóvar’s Work: A Site of Rhizomatic Symbolic Violence – Jenny O’ Connor
Queer Rewrites of the Self in the Songs of Suzanne Vega: “I will be Dietrich and you can be Dean” – Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka
Women in Sport: The Oxymoronic Irish Woman Athlete and her Experiences of Traditional Gender Constructs within a Mainstream Heteronormative Society – Linda Green

Individuals: Order this book for £24.95 using your Mastercard/Visa/American Express/Switch/Solo
ISBN 978-0-7734-4830-8
PRICE £29.95 plus £5.00 postage and packing = £34.95
or go to www.mellenpress.co.uk

Carysfort Press has recently published Maurice Harmon's translation of Acallam na Senorach, a medieval compendium of stories and poems. It is called The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland and has an introduction and notes.

One of Ireland's greatest collections of stories and poems, The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland is a new translation by Maurice Harmon of the 12th century Acallam na Senorach. Retold in a refreshing modern idiom, the Dialogue is an extraordinary account of journeys to the four provinces by St. Patrick and the pagan Cailte, one of the surviving Fian. Within the frame story are over 200 other stories reflecting many genres – wonder tales, sea journeys, romances, stories of revenge, tales of monsters and magic.

The poems are equally varied –lyrics, nature poems, eulogies, prophecies, laments, genealogical poems. After the Tain Bo Cuailnge, the Acallam is the largest surviving prose work in Old and Middle Irish. Emeritus Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature, UCD, Dr. Harmon is an internationally known poet, critic, editor, biographer and scholar. He has been engaged throughout his distinguished academic career with the rich traditions of his own country. As a poet, he brings to life the various poetic forms of the medieval text. The title poem of his most recent collection, The Mischevious Boy and other poems, 2008, has been set to music by Derek Ball. Maurice Harmon brings to his translation a wide experience of modern Irish literature in English, in many areas of which, from O'Faolain to Beckett, he is an acknowledged expert. He here contends directly with a much earlier expression of Irishness as a part of a continuing process of cultural and textual renewal in which we as readers are privileged to participate'. From the Preface by Sean O Coilean, Professor of Modern Irish, NUI, Cork

Irish Elegies by Chris Arthur
In this volume, critically acclaimed author Chris Arthur continues his experiments with the mercurial literary genre of the essay, using it in innovative ways to explore aspects of family, place, memory, loss, and meaning. Through these unique prose meditations, readers are led to a dozen unexpected windows on Ireland.

“Arthur's marvelous essays get to grips, evocatively and obliquely, with ideas of ancestry, continuity, attitudes and allegiances – all in a volatile Irish context…Taking a wide view, as he does, he can't escape an awareness of endless complexity underlying every moment and every perception; but, far from fostering vagueness, this results in unimpeachable precision.”--Times Literary Supplement

"The deliberation with which he writes recalls a woodcutter, polishing his creations until they give off a deep, burnished glow."-- Belfast Telegraph

“Whatever his subject, Arthur uses language that pares away at the core of experience with a care and precision we have grown unused to, chasing away clichés of thought as well as of phrase. Even in a rare genre, he's a rare writer indeed."--The Scotsman

“Chris Arthur’s essay collections should not only put him on the map as the contemporary Irish essayist, but also raise general interest in the possibilities of the essay form for our time.”--Graham Good, Southern Humanities Review

CONTENTS: Foreword: The Willow is Green, the Flower is Red * (En)trance * Rosary * On Not Being Who You Think You Are * Bookmarks * Wisdom’s Garden * How’s the Form? * Thirty-six Views, None of Mount Fuji * Falling Memory * Broken Flags * Object Lesson on Qualia with No Mention of This Term * Essay on the Esse * Last Words

Chris Arthur is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter and the author of Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Haiku. Widely published as a poet and essayist on both sides of the Atlantic, his work has appeared in a range of literary journals including The American Scholar, Descant, Irish Pages, The Literary Review, North American Review, Orion, and the Threepenny Review. His work has been listed in the “Notable Essays” section of Best American Essays five times, and awarded the Akegarasu Haya International Essay Prize and Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award.

A stunning collection of essays that showcases the extraordinary emotional depth and intellectual range of a unique voice in Irish writing.

"Chris Arthur's marvellouw essays get to grips, evocatively and obliquely, with ideas of ancestry, continuity, attitudes and allegiances -- all in a volatile Irish context."--TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Irish literature since 1990: Diverse voices
Edited by Scott Brewster & Michael Parker

"With its diverse array of international scholarship, critical overviews and textual analyses, Irish Literature Since 1990 provides a path-breaking assessment of trends and themes in representations of postnational Ireland. A valuable resource for both teachers and students."
George O'Brien, Professor of English, Georgetown University ( Washington DC)

Irish Literature since 1990: Diverse voices is a distinctive book that examines the diversity and energy of writing in a period marked by the unparalleled global prominence of Irish culture.

This collection provides a wide-ranging survey of fiction, poetry and drama over the last two decades, considering both well-established figures and also emerging writers who have received relatively little critical attention before. Contributors explore the central developments within Irish culture and society that have transformed the writing and reading of identity, sexuality, history and gender. The book examines the impact of Mary Robinson's Presidency; growing cultural confidence 'back home'; legislative reform on sexual and moral issues; the uneven effects generated by the resurgence of the Irish economy (the 'Celtic Tiger' myth); Ireland's increasingly prominent role in Europe; and changing reputation.

In its breadth and critical currency, this book will be of particular interest to academics and students working in the fields of literature, drama and cultural studies.

Contents:-

Acknowledgements
Introduction
I: Changing History: the Republic and Northern Ireland since 1990 - Michael Parker
II: Flying High? Culture, Criticism, Theory since 1990 - Scott Brewster
Part One: Drama
1. ‘Home Places: Irish Drama since 1990’ - Clare Wallace and Ondrej Pilny
2. ‘Foregrounding the Body and Performance in Plays by Gina Moxley, Emma Donoghue and Marina Carr - Maria Kurdi
3. ‘The Stuff of Tragedy? Representations of Irish Political Leaders in the ‘Haughey’ Plays of Carr, Barry and Breen - Anthony Roche
4. ‘New Articulations of Irishness and Otherness on the Contemporary Irish Stage’ - Martine Pelletier
Part Two: Poetry
5. ‘Scattered and Diverse: Irish Poetry Since 1990’ - Jerzy Jarniewicz and John McDonagh
6. Architectural Metaphors: Representations of the House in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní
Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke’ - Lucy Collins
7. ‘The places I go back to’: Familiarisation and Making Strange in Seamus
Heaney’s Later Poetry - Joanna Cowper
8. ‘Neither Here Nor There’: New Generation Northern Irish Poets (Sinead Morrissey
and Nick Laird) - Michael Parker
Part Three: Fiction
9. ‘Tomorrow we will change our names, invent ourselves again’: Irish Fiction and
Autobiography since 1990 - Liam Harte
10. Anne Enright and Postnationalism in the Contemporary Irish Novel - Heidi Hansson
11. Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, John Walsh’s The Falling Angels and John McGahern’s Memoir - Stephen Regan
12. Secret Gardens: Unearthing the Truth in Patrick O’Keeffe’s The Hill Road - Vivian Valvano Lynch
13. ‘What’s it like being Irish?’: The Return of the Repressed in Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer - Jennifer M. Jeffers
14. Remembering to Forget: Northern Irish Fiction after the Troubles - Neal Alexander
Part Four : After Words
15. ‘What Do I Say When They Wheel out Their Dead?’: The Representation of
Violence in Northern Irish Art - Shane Alcobia-Murphy
Notes on contributors
Index

Scott Brewster is Director of English at the University of Salford, Michael Parker is Professor of English at the University of Central Lancashire and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool Institute of Irish Studies.

234x156mm 320pp

CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON GLOBALISATION AND IRELAND
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. XIV, 242 pp.
Reimagining Ireland. Vol. 5 Edited by Eamon Maher
ISBN 978-3-03911-851-9 pb.

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vLang=E&vID=11851

In the space of a few short decades, Ireland has become one of the most globalised societies in the Western world. The full ramifications of this transformation for traditional Irish communities, religious practice, economic activity, as well as literature and the arts, are as yet unknown. What is known is that Ireland’s largely unthinking embrace of globalisation has at times had negative consequences. Unlike some other European countries, Ireland has eagerly and sometimes recklessly grasped the opportunities for material advancement afforded by the global project.

This collection of essays, largely the fruit of two workshops organised under the auspices of the Humanities Institute of Ireland at University College Dublin and the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in the Institute of Technology, Tallaght, explores how globalisation has taken such a firm hold on Irish society and provides a cultural perspective on the phenomenon. The book is divided into two sections. The first examines various manifestations of globalisation in Irish society whereas the second focuses on literary representations of globalisation. The contributors, acknowledged experts in the areas of cultural theory, religion, sociology and literature, offer a panoply of viewpoints of Ireland’s interaction with globalisation.

Contents:
Fintan O’Toole: Foreword – Eamon Maher: Introduction – Michael Cronin: Inside Out: Time and Place in Global Ireland – Catherine Maignant: The Global Irish Spirit – Grace Neville: In at the Death: The French Press and the Celtic Tiger – Eugene O’Brien: Negotiating the Self: The Spectral Mobile Subject – Peadar Kirby: Globalisation, Vulnerability and the Return to Religion: Reflections from the Irish Experience – Tom Inglis: The Global is Personal – Anne Fogarty: Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Transnational Imaginary – Alison O’Malley-Younger/Tom Herron: ‘Root and Routes’: Home and Away in Friel and Heaney – Patrick Lonergan: Irish Theatre and Globalisation: A Faustian Pact? – Willy Maley: ‘Coming of Age’ (and other Fictions of Globalisation) in Three Novels by Seamus Deane, Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe – Eamon Maher: ‘The Universal is the Local without Walls’: John McGahern and the Global Project.

RENOGOTIATING AND RESISTING NATIONALISM IN 20TH-CENTURY IRISH DRAMA
Edited by Scott Boltwood
Colin Smythe Limited, 2009. Xvi, 211 pp.
Ulster Editions and Monographs (General Editor, Robert Welch). Vol. 15 £38.00
ISBN 978-0-86140-464-3 hb.

The essays in this collection seek to refine our understanding of the often polyvalent and conflicted engagement that Irish dramatists have entered into with nationalism, a cultural and political movement that they have often attempted to simultaneously resist and renegotiate.

These ten essays construct a genealogy of dissent, of loyal opposition, revealing the apprehension and dissatisfaction with which the twentieth century's most influential playwrights have sometimes viewed the Irish state, from its emergence in the early 1900s to its maturity at the century's end. The articles on W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, J.M. Synge, and Sean O'Casey reveal the early Abbey Theatre's struggle to critique the failures of and influence the development of the early state and its proscriptive brand of nationalist Irishness. The essays exploring the later plays of Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Anne Devlin, Christina Reid, Marie Jones, and Marina Carr expose both the conceptual and political failures of mainstream Irishness in the second half of the twentieth century to satisfy the material or political aspirations of people on either side of the Irish border. While many of this collection's essays share a common postcolonial interpretive strategy, individual articles also employ the strategies of ecocriticism, social anthropology, structuralism, feminism, and nationalist theory. The fifteenth volume in the Ulster Editions and Monographs series

CONTENTS
Scott Boltwood. Introduction
Colonialism and the Free State: Hyangsoon Yi. The Traveller in Irish Drama and the Works of J.M.Synge and Seamus O'Kelly Barbara Suess. Individualism and the Acceptance of Other: Yeats and Where There is Nothing Scott Boltwood. 'I keep silence for good or evil': Lady Gregory's Cloon plays and Home Rule Paul Cantor. O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock and the Problematic Freedom of the Irish Free State

The Republic and the North Paul Davies. Earthing the Void: Beckett, Bio-regionalism, and Eco-poetics Shaun Richards. Brian Friel: Seizing the Moment of Flux Ros Dixon. Chekhov Bogged Down? Tom Kilroy's version of The Seagull Susan Cannon Harris. Her Blood and Her Brother: Gender and Sacrifice in Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians Rebecca Pelan. Two's Company, Three's a Community: Women's Drama from Northern Ireland Maria-Elena Doyle. 'What Sort of Monsters Must We Have Been': Irishness and the Gothic in McDonagh, Carr and McPherson

The Editor: Scott Boltwood has written on Dion Boucicault, Lady Gregory, Brian Friel, and the Ulster Group Theatre; his book Brian Friel, Ireland, and The North (2007) is published by Cambridge University Press. He has been a Visiting Professor of Drama at Queen's University, Belfast; a Research Fellow at the Academy of Irish Cultural Heritages in Derry, Northern Ireland; and a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Ulster, Coleraine. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Emory & Henry College.

THE DREAMING BODY: Contemporary Irish Theatre
Edited by Melissa Sihra and Paul Murphy

In A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (1984), the late Professor D.E.S. Maxwell states that the drama of J.M. Synge has ‘an effect of language [to] disturb the apparent solidity of his stage’s material accessories, to fantasticate and mythologise character into action.’ In a sense, this is what all great drama does; through the use of the fantastic and the mythic, it disturbs the ‘solidity’ of the world as we know it. The works presented and discussed in this volume, show how the material of the everyday is transformed by the dreams of theatre makers, as we journey forth into the 21st Century. In writings by Marina Carr, Seamus Heaney, Olwen Fouéré, Terry Eagleton, Paul Murphy, Aoife Monks, Melissa Sihra, Conall Morrison, Mark Phelan, Eamonn Jordan, Brian Singleton, Lynne Parker, Rhona Trench, Stephen Regan, David Johnston and Donal O’Kelly we see examples of creative writing which engage critically with a world that is constantly changing, and examples of critical writing which engage creatively with theatre that is constantly evolving.

This book is also a celebration of the vitality, originality and richness of theatre practice and scholarship on the island today. In Olwen Fouéré’s 1999 production Angel/Babel, the millennial cyborg-figure says: ‘The dreaming body lies at the core of everything and the metaphor of the dark is much richer and stranger than what is being talked about.’ Theatre, indeed all art, is impossible without the dreaming body, whether it is the body of the performer, the playwright, the designer, the scholar or the director. Such creative impulses are at the heart of what this book seeks to explore. Theatre practice and scholarship in Ireland, North and South, has never been more vibrant and energised. This collection of writings offers a taste of the dreams and imaginings which have materialised on the island over the last forty years. The sixteenth volume in the Ulster Editions & Monographs Series.

Contents
Seamus Heaney. ‘The Wood Road’
Melissa Sihra & Paul Murphy. Introduction, ‘The Dreaming Body’
Eamonn Jordan. ‘Urban Dramas: Any Myth Will Do?’
Extract from Marina Carr’s Chekhov, introduced by Melissa Sihra
Lynne Parker. ‘Showtime: The Strategy of Mischief in the Plays of Stewart Parker’
Mark Phelan. ‘Performing “Authentic” Ireland: (Dis)connecting the Cultural Politics of the Irish Revival and the Celtic Tiger on the Irish Stage’
Rhona Trench. ‘Staging Morality in On Raftery’s Hill: A Kristevan Reading’
Stephen Regan. ‘Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar’
Extract from Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar
Brian Singleton. ‘Queer Eye for the Irish Guy: Transgressive Sexualities and the Performance of Nation’
Olwen Fouéré. ‘Operating Theatre and Angel/Babel’
Aoife Monks. ‘Looking for Fiona: Gender and Nationality in the Work of Fiona Shaw’
Paul Murphy. ‘Brian Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee, or what was lost in Translations’
Conall Morrison. ‘The Future of Greek Tragedy and The Bacchae of Baghdad’
Extract from Conall Morrison’s The Bacchae of Baghdad
Melissa Sihra. ‘Birthdays and Deathdays in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett and Marina Carr’
David Johnston. ‘En otras palabras: Frank McGuinness and Spanish Drama’
Donal O’Kelly in conversation with Paul Murphy
Robert Welch. ‘Afterword’

AFFECTING IRISHNESS:Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond the Nation
James P. Byrne / Padraig Kirwan / Michael O’Sullivan (eds)
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. XVIII, 314 pp., 4 ill.
Reimagining Ireland. Vol. 2
Edited by Eamon Maher
ISBN 978-3-03911-830-4 pb.

This collection of new essays addresses a key debate in Irish studies. While it is important that new research endeavours to accommodate the new and powerful manifestations of Irishness that are evident today in our globalised economy, these considerations are often overlooked. The writers in this book seek to reconcile the established critical perspectives of Irish studies with a forward-looking critical momentum that incorporates the realities of globalisation and economic migration.

The book initiates this vital discussion by bringing together a series of provocative and thoughtful essays, from both renowned and rising international scholars, on the vicissitudes of cultural identity in a post-modern, post-colonial and post-national Ireland. By including work by leading scholars in the fields of film studies, migration and Diaspora studies, travel literature and gender studies, this collection offers a thorough twenty-first-century interrogation of Irishness and provides a timely fusion of international perspectives on Irish cultural identity.

Contents:
Raphaël Ingelbien: Irish Studies, the Postcolonial Paradigm and the Comparative Mandate – Oona Frawley: ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’ Spenser and Irishness – Anne-Catherine Lobo: Irishness and the Body: The Presence of the Body in the Debates on Poverty in the Early Nineteenth Century – Linda M. Hagan: The Ulster-Scots and the ‘Greening’ of Ireland: A Precarious Belonging? – Niall O’Gallagher: ‘Ma Right Insane Yirwanny Us Jimmy?’: Irishness in Modern Scottish Writing – Carol Baraniuk: The Leid, the Pratoe and the Buik: Northern Cultural Markers in the Works of James Orr – Aoileann Ní Éigeartaigh: ‘No Rootless Colonist’: John Hewitt’s Regionalist Approach to Identity – Maureen T. Reddy: Representing Travellers – Jason King: Irish Multicultural Fiction: Metaphors of Miscegenation and Interracial Romance – Iris Lindahl-Raittila: Subversive Identities: Femininity, Sexuality and ‘Irishness’ in Novels by Edna O’Brien – Justin Carville: A ‘Sympathetic Look’: Documentary Humanism and Irish Identity in Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’ – Thomas W. Ihde: Irish-American Identity and the Irish Language – William H. Mulligan, Jr: Shades of Green and Orange: Irish Identity in Diaspora – Florence Schneider: Muldoon’s Palimpsestic Irishness – Ruth Barton: The Voice of Pierce Brosnan – Daniel Tobin: Shades, Minstrel and Majestic – Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem: Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin’s ‘Other at the Edge of Life’.

The Editors:
James P. Byrne is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Emerson College, Boston. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the University of Massachusetts in 2000. He has recently co-edited the three-volume work “ Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History” (2008).
Padraig Kirwan is currently Lecturer in the Literature of the Americas at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was a Fulbright Scholar to the University of California in 2002 and an Irish Research Council Scholar from 2000 to 2001. His work has appeared in a number of journals including the Journal of American Studies. Michael O’Sullivan is Assistant Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His recent publications include "Michel Henry: Incarnation, Barbarism and Belief" (published by Peter Lang in 2006) and "The Incarnation of Language: Joyce, Proust and a Philosophy of the Flesh" (2008).

http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vLang=E&vID=11830

IRISH POETRY AFTER FEMINISM edited by Justin Quinn
Charles University Prague

These essays are revised versions of lectures given at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco and address some of the most exciting developments in Irish poetry over the last thirty years, concentrating especially on the work of Derek Mahon, Medbh McGuckian, Vona Groarke and Sinéad Morrissey. Irish Poetry after Feminism also includes forthright debate between the contributors about the relations between ideology and poetics. Gathering some of the finest critics, the volume makes an important contribution to one of the central debates about Irish literature.

’Feminism and Irish poetry … are natural allies, not antagonists; to posit them otherwise is to declare the redundancy of art in its capacity to change lives on its own terms. With such an understanding, students of the topic of Irish poetry after feminism are released to seek out its neglected aspect in an investigation of Irish feminism after poetry, in confidence that relations of hospitality and exchange, rather than those of absolutism and hierarchy, can be expected to prevail between the art form and the intellectual, social and political tradition concerned.’ Catriona Clutterbuck

Contents
Dr Justin Quinn. Introduction
Dr Moynagh Sullivan, National University of Ireland. Irish Poetry after Feminism: In Search of ‘Male Poets’
Dr Peter McDonald, Oxford University. The Touch of a Blind Man: Forms, Origins and ‘Hermeneutics’ in Poetry
Dr Catriona Clutterbuck, National University of Ireland. An Unapproved Alliance: Feminism and Form in the Irish Poetry Debate
Derek Mahon. FirstPrinciples
Dr Fran Brearton, Queen’s University Belfast. On Derek Mahon’s First Principles
Dr Lucy Collins, St Martin’s College. Northeast of Nowhere: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey and Post-Feminist Spaces
Selina Guinness, Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology. The Annotated House: Feminism and Form
Dr Leontia Flynn, Queen’s University Belfast. On the Sofa: Parody & McGuckian
Dr David Wheatley, University of Hull. That They May Be Damned: Samuel Beckett and the Poetry of Misogyny

This is the tenth volume in the Princess Grace Irish Library Lecture Series, and is limited to 250 copies.

Justin Quinn was born in Dublin in 1968 and educated there at Trinity College. He is the author of two studies of twentieth-century American poetry, as well as the Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 (2008). He has also published four books of poems, most recently, Waves & Trees (Gallery, 2006). With David Wheatley was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine, Metre. His translations of the Czech poet Petr Borkovec, From the Interior, appear in 2008 from Seren (Bridgend, Wales). He is an Associate Professor at the Charles University, Prague.

Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia by Eóin Flannery

Drawing together the strands of intellectual debate on Ireland's contested colonial history, and its problematic literary historical, historiographical and theoretical legacies, Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia illuminates and explicates the position occupied by postcolonial theory in shaping contemporary Irish culture. Rather than merely restate existing arguments, the volume is framed as an interrogative critical genealogy of all facets of Irish postcolonial studies. Ireland and Postcolonial Studies provides an original, substantive and up-to-date contribution to a key intellectual field in Irish literary and cultural history. Beginning with the founding of the Field Day Company in the early 1980s and covering such topics as feminism; utopianism; Marxism; nationalism; revisionism; modernization; subaltern studies; and the role of the university, the volume charts the subsequent development of postcolonial perspectives on Irish cultural and historical studies.

'This outstanding book offers the first comprehensive survey of the postcolonial turn in literary and cultural studies. Not least of its merits is its clarity of exposition, using a chronological, thematic and authorial focus to untangle an often complex skein of intellectual positions. What is particularly impressive in Flannery's study is his capacity to show how even the smallest nuances in recent Irish critical debates may challenge not only Irish intellectual orthodoxies but also of some of the dominant paradigms in postcolonial theory. Flannery's intervention represents a considerable advance on the sterile revisionist/post-revisionist debate, or literary versus historical approaches to Irish culture, thus opening up new interdisciplinary vistas on the emergent critical field of Irish Studies.' - Luke Gibbons, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, USA

'Flannery asks trenchant and vexing questions about the relationship between postcolonial criticism as a practice and Irish literary studies as a politics - questions that illuminate the shared, contentious ground between the two and demand attention from students of the "post-colony" across the globe. Hardly exceptional, though deeply historically contingent, the case of Ireland is clearly a matrix for post/colonial modernities of all kinds. Beyond Erin, Flannery's thoughtful and canny readings of a host of major and minor players offer innovative and eminently portable exemplars of radical humanism's heuristic promise.' - Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, University of Illinois, USA

Ireland in Focus: Film, Photography, and Popular Culture
Edited by Eóin Flannery and Michael Griffin
With a Foreword by Colin Graham
Cloth $29.95s | 978-0-8156-3203-0 | 2009

Ireland in Focus is the first book to address the diverse range of visual representations of national and communal identity in Ireland. From an analysis of the Guinness brand’s reflection of Irish identity to an exploration of murals and film portrayals of political prisoners, this pioneering collection of essays seeks to present Ireland’s relationship to visual culture as a whole. While other works have explored the imagistic history of Ireland, most have restricted their lens to a single form of visual representation. Ireland in Focus is the first book to address the diverse range of visual representations of national and communal identity in Ireland.

The contributors examine the politics of visual representation from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Drawing from the areas of cultural theory, postcolonial studies, art criticism, documentary and archival history, and gender studies, the essays provide novel insights on a variety of visual-cultural forms, including film, theater, photography, landscape art, political murals, and the visual iconography of commercial marketing. Bringing together established scholars and emerging young critics in the field, Ireland in Focus breaks new ground in showcasing the essential dynamism of visual culture and its relationship to Irish studies.

Eóin Flannery is a lecturer in English literature at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Versions of Ireland: Empire, Modernity, and Resistance in Irish Culture and Enemies of Empire.

Michael Griffin is a lecturer in English in the Department of Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick, where he also codirects the English and History Program. He has published widely in journals such as Field Day Review, Utopian Studies, and The Review of English Studies.

Anáil and Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture by John Eastlake, Seán Crosson and Nessa Cronin

Anáil an Bhéil Bheo brings together a stimulating range of interdisciplinary essays considering the connections between orality and modern Irish culture. From literature to song, folklore to the visual arts, contributors examine not only the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland, but also the theoretical concept of “orality” itself and the corresponding significance of oral texts in Irish society. Featuring work by emerging scholars in the fields of history, literature, folklore, music, women’s studies, film and theatre studies and disciplines contributing to Irish Studies, this multifaceted volume also includes contributions from scholars long engaged with issues of orality such as Gearóid Ó Crualaoich and Henry Glassie.

Nessa Cronin is Lecturer in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway; Seán Crosson is a Lecturer with the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at National University of Ireland, Galway; John Eastlake completed his PhD in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway in 2008, and is currently teaching Irish Studies in Galway .

Patrick Pearse (1879-1916) is chiefly remembered as a political activist, executed for his leading role in the Easter Rising of 1916, but he was also a qualified barrister, teacher, and versatile writer. As well as stories, he published articles on a variety of cultural topics, plays, poetry, and political pamphlets right up until the time of his death. Joseph Campbell (1879-1944) published a number of well-received volumes of poetry, before increasing involvement in republican activities led to his internment after the War of Independence. Following his release, he moved to America but returned to Ireland for the final years of his life.

Translated from Irish by Joseph Campbell, Patrick Pearse's ten stories were first published between 1905 and 1916. Groundbreaking in Pearse's recourse to modern narrative techniques and his use of vernacular Irish, these stories provide a sympathetic portrayal of life in Connemara. Joseph Campbell translated them into English in the aftermath of the 1916 "Rising". His translations capture the spirit and tone of the original stories, largely because they are written in a distinctive form of Hiberno-Irish that reflects Pearse's use of colloquial speech.

Anne Markey is Long Room Hub Postdoctoral Fellow on the Early Irish Fiction project at Trinity College Dublin.

Kathleen Heininge, Buffoonery in Irish Drama: Staging Twentieth-Century Post-Colonial Stereotypes

Generations of Irish playwrights have tried to assert the reputation of the stage Irish figure as other than comic, but each effort was in its turn assailed as buffoonery. Using post-colonial and performative theory, Buffoonery in Irish Drama demonstrates the ways the Irish struggled to create a sense of identity in a colonial structure, and it explores the distortion and appropriation of that new identity that elicit further calls to eradicate negative stereotypes. Demonstrating the pervasiveness of the reclamation efforts, Buffoonery in Irish Drama covers a wide range of well-known and obscure plays to show the trajectory of twentieth-century drama that brings us into a globalized twenty-first-century Ireland.

Kathleen Heininge received her doctorate from University of California Davis and is now Assistant Professor of Writing/Literature at George Fox University in Oregon, where she teaches British and world literature and women’s studies. She publishes primarily on Irish literature, especially drama.

Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan and the Politics of Style is a significant contribution to growing scholarly interest in an important Irish literary figure of the nineteenth century. In this work, Dr. Julie Donovan contextualizes Owenson's emblematic Irishness that was too often dismissed as merely excessive showmanship. The study includes an extensive discussion of Owenson's often-overlooked personal papers and artifacts housed in the National Library of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy. No previous study has fully considered this crucial archival material and its implications. In addition, Owenson's unpublished and hitherto unconsulted letters from various university collections including Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity College, Princeton, and Penn State are analyzed as part of this original research monograph.

The table of contents includes: Introduction; Chap 1: Text and Textile in The Wild Irish Girl; Chap 2: Sydney Owenson's Personae; Chap 3: How Sydney Owenson Played the Harp; Chap 4: Ireland in Europe and the World; Chap 5: The Wild Irish Girl in the Victorian Period.

This collection of thirteen essays, penned by an array of leading scholars in the field, is the first full-length critical study of the Belfast poet and prose writer, and makes a timely appearance in this, the writer's sixtieth year. Additionally, the book includes an interview given by Carson to the editor. Ciaran Carson has played a major role in the internationalization of contemporary Irish poetry from the late 1960s, through the Troubles of the 80s and 90s, to the present time. Taken together, these essays chart the development of his diverse and prolific career, scrutinizing his experiments in a new urban poetics, including his obsessive concern with maps and labyrinths; they examine his interest in narrative, and explore the continuities between his poetry and his prose; and they consider his relation to various poetic traditions: English Romantic, European Symbolist, Modernist and Postmodernist, Irish language, and contemporary American.

The contributors to this volume include: Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Peter Denman, David Wheatley, John Goodby, Eamonn Hughes, Stan Smith, Michael McAteer, Tim Hancock, Patricia Horton, Frank Sewell, Ciaran O'Neill, Jerzy Jarniewic and Alan Gillis.

This book is published in hardback and paperback and is available in all good bookshops and via: www.fourcourtspress.ie

Samuel Beckett is one of the most important figures in the history of Irish literature, and he continues to influence successive generations of writers. In Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing, Stephen Watt searches for the ‘Beckettian’ impulse in Irish literature by tracing the Nobel Prize winner’s legacy through a rich selection of contemporary novelists, poets and dramatists. Watt examines leading figures such as Paul Muldoon, Brian Friel, Marina Carr and Bernard MacLaverty, and shows how Beckett’s presence, whether openly acknowledged or unstated, is always thoroughly pervasive. Moving on to an exploration of Beckett’s role in the twenty-first century, the study discusses ways in which this legacy can be reshaped to deal with current concerns that extend beyond literature. Encouraging us to think about Beckett’s work and status in new ways, this landmark study will be required reading for scholars and students of Beckett and Irish studies.

Introduction: Beckett, our contemporary; 1. Beckett and the ‘Beckettian’; 2. The Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ play and Brian Friel’s Beckettian turn; 3. Bernard MacLaverty: the ‘troubles’, late modernism, and the Beckettian; 4. ‘Getting round’ Beckett: Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon; 5. Specters of Beckett: Marina Carr and the ‘other Sam’; Coda: On retrofitting: Samuel Beckett, tourist attraction.


	The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures