Bücher der Reihe Reimagining Ireland

This engaging collection of essays considers the cultural complexities of the Franco-Irish relationship, in song and story, image and cuisine, novels, paintings and poetry. It casts a fresh eye on public perceptions of the historic bonds between Ireland and France, revealing a rich variety of contact and influence.

«This collection marks the coming of age of Irish Jewish Studies. Beautifully curated by Zuleika Rodgers and Natalie Wynn, it brings together the best of recent scholarship, covering history, politics, literature and everyday life. Taken together these essays show the complexity of both the Irish Jewish experience and responses to them.»(Tony Kushner, James Parkes Professor of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, University of Southampton)«A refreshingly nuanced exploration of perceptions and self-perceptions of Irish Jews. The authors interrogate political, religious, economic, social and cultural discourses from the eighteenth century to contemporary times to unravel less-familiar expressions of antisemitism, alongside occasional philosemitism, and offer critical insights on the many reimaginations of Christian Ireland¿s long-standing migrant Other minority.»(Guy Beiner, Sullivan Chair of Irish Studies, Boston College)Discourse, both scholarly and popular, around the Jews of Ireland has increased in recent years and this volume of essays takes up the challenge of placing it within the framework of Jewish historiography and the study of Jewish history and culture. The focus of the volume is to provide a critical re-evaluation of the study of Irish Jews looking at key areas such as Irish Jewish historiography, communal traditions, antisemitism, nationalism (Jewish and Irish) and representations in popular media. Underlying the contributions is the desire to reassess the ways in which traditional scholarship and representation of Irish Jews have been shaped by uninterrogated narratives and a lack of understanding and sensitivity to the context of Jewish history and the Jewish experience.

Presents an examination of the emergence, reception and legacy of modernism in Ireland. Engaging with the ongoing re-evaluation of regional and national modernisms, this title includes essays that reveal both the importance of modernism to Ireland, and that of Ireland to modernism.

Liminality, if interpreted as a concern with borders and states of in-betweenness, is a widespread theme in Irish literature and culture, which is perhaps not surprising considering the colonial and postcolonial background of Ireland. The liminal, from the Latin word limen, meaning «a threshold», can be broadly defined as a transitional place of becoming. It is a borderland state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, leading those who participate in the process to new perspectives and possibilities. This collection of essays examines the theme of liminality in Irish literature and culture against the philosophical discourse of modernity and focuses on representations of liminality in contemporary Irish literature, art and film in a variety of contexts. The book is divided into four sections. The first part deals with theoretical aspects of liminal states. Other sections focus on liminal narratives and explore drama as liminal rites of passage, while the last part examines transformative spaces in contemporary Irish women¿s poetry.

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.

The 1798 Rebellion, a watershed event in Irish history, has been a source of both inspiration and controversy over the last two centuries and continues to provoke debate up to the present day. The ongoing discussion about the meaning of the Rebellion has not been limited to history books, but has also found vivid expression in Irish fiction and theatre. The product of extensive research, this study provides a comprehensive survey of historical novels and plays published on the topic throughout the twentieth century, comparing them with relevant historiography. It draws attention to a number of outstanding but often neglected literary works, bringing together materials written in both English and Irish. Employing important theoretical concepts such as Derrida's 'spectre' and Hayden White's tropological view of history, the book probes the relationship between historiography and fiction to shed light on their interplay in the Irish context, including the 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland. This investigation illuminates a number of broader questions, including the most pressing of all: in what way should we deal with the 'spectres' of the past and their complex legacies?

These essays explore literary and cultural representations of the Irish family, questioning the validity of traditional familial structures and exploring newer versions of the Irish family emerging in recent cultural representations. Works discussed range from Famine fiction, Samuel Beckett and John McGahern to Anne Enright and Hugo Hamilton.

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

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

This detailed study explores the significance of the 'Library of Ireland', a book series originated in the 1840s by the Young Irelanders Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy. Focusing on the literary anthologies and literary histories published in this series, the author demonstrates how they attempted to articulate a new national identity for Irish readers based on Young Ireland ideas. Despite the vast amount of scholarly work on Irish nationalism and literature, very little attention has hitherto been paid to the 'Library of Ireland' series. This book recovers the fundamental role played by the series in the creation of a sense of Irish identity, and also examines the publications within the wider theoretical context of anthology studies. It is an original and highly stimulating contribution to the literary and cultural history of nineteenth-century Ireland.

This book examines theatre within the context of the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, with reference to a wide variety of plays, theatre productions and community engagements within and across communities. The author clarifies both the nature of the social and political vision of a number of major contemporary Northern Irish dramatists and the manner in which this vision is embodied in text and in performance. The book identifies and celebrates a tradition of playwrights and drama practitioners who, to this day, challenge and question all Northern Irish ideologies and propose alternative paths. The author's analysis of a selection of Northern Irish plays, written and produced over the course of the last thirty years or so, illustrates the great variety of approaches to ideology in Northern Irish drama, while revealing a common approach to staging the conflict and the peace process, with a distinct emphasis on utopian performatives and the possibility of positive change.

The Irish National Theatre Society began its centenary in 2004 with ambitious theatrical events at home and abroad. By the end of the year, however, the company was close to financial ruin, culminating in its dissolution and subsequent reestablishment. The financial crisis was only one element of controversy during the centenary year. During this period, the remit of the Abbey Theatre as a house for the performance of Irish identity and new Irish writing was brought into question. While debates unfolded over the artistic and financial crises, many commentators queried the very nature of, or need for, a national theatre in twenty-first-century Ireland. Examining organizational issues such as finance and public policy, as well as wider questions about the representation of Irishness on the national stage and the shaping of collective memory through commemoration, this book questions the way that the private concerns of the Irish National Theatre reflect greater issues within Irish society. Drawing together personal interviews, government documents, media sources and comparative studies from the history of the Republic, the author interweaves current and past crises of the Abbey Theatre with the social, cultural and financial anxieties of an evolving Ireland.

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

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

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

This book looks at the effects, symptoms and consequences of the period in Irish culture known as the Celtic Tiger. It traces the critical pathway from boom to bust through an analysis of events, personalities and products. The short entries offer a sense of the lived experience of this seismic period in contemporary Irish society.

This book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation. In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the 'new Irish'. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. Ireland has always been a culturally diverse space and has produced a series of high-profile mixed-race stars, including Phil Lynott, Ruth Negga and Simon Zebo, among others. Through an analysis of screen visualizations of the black Irish, this study uncovers forgotten histories, challenges the perceived homogeneity of the nation, evaluates integration, and considers the future of the new Ireland. It makes a creative and significant theoretical contribution to scholarly work on the relationship between representation and identity in Irish cinema. This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

This volume explores canonical novels of the Irish land war, as well as looking at the material conditions of reading and writing in late nineteenth-century Ireland. It includes a reprinted letter by author Mary Anne Sadlier, a reproduction of Rosa Mulholland's little-known play Our Boycotting and a detailed bibliography of land war fiction.

This collection offers a sustained and up-to-date analysis of the cultural connections between Ireland and Scotland. It focuses on writers, from Charles Robert Maturin to Liam McIlvanney, whose work offers insights into debates around identity and politics in the two nations, often overwhelmed by connections with their larger neighbour, England.

The engaging figure of Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) comes to light and to life in this collection of perceptive essays on his works and influences. International Moore scholars venture into previously unexplored literary, historical and psychological territory, shining new light on Moore's presentation of the quirks of human nature.

This volume presents the latest research from Irish studies scholars across a range of disciplines, including history, literature, theatre, photography and folklore, and generates new insights into the dynamics of cultural remembrance in Irish society. It offers an overview of the recent cross-fertilization between memory studies and Irish studies.

Explores bilingualism and translation in women's writing. This book argues that the 'in-between' or interstitial linguistic areas of bilingualism, translation and regionalism provide a language and imagery suitable for the expression of a specifically female consciousness.

These essays offer fascinating insights into the role played by gastronomy in Irish literature and culture. They explore the importance of food in Irish writing; culinary practices among the 1950s Dublin working class; new trends among Ireland's 'foodie' generation; and the economic and tourism possibilities created by gastronomic nationalism.

Providing unique and new perspectives that have been evolved mostly from papers read at an international conference held in Kyoto, Japan, this collection attempts to reassess and explore the values of Irish literature in a global context.

This volume represents a significant new stage in Irish Famine scholarship, adopting a broad interdisciplinary approach that includes ground-breaking demographical, economic, cultural and literary research on poverty, poor relief and class relations during one of Europe's most devastating food crises.

This study explores the fiction of John Banville within a variety of cultural, political, ethical and philosophical contexts. Through thematic readings of the novels, Eoghan Smith examines the complexity of Banville's view of the artwork and explores the novelist's attraction and resistance to forms of authenticity, whether aesthetic, existential or ideological. Emphasizing in particular the influence of Banville's major Irish modernist precursor, Samuel Beckett, this book places the local elements of his writing alongside his wide-ranging literary and philosophical interests. Highlighting the evolving nature of Banville's engagement with varieties of authenticity, it explores the art of failure and the failure of art, the power and politics of the contemporary imagination, and the ways in which this important contemporary writer continues to redefine the boundaries of Irish fiction.