Bücher der Reihe Reimagining Ireland

These essays reflect on the unfolding nature of Irish cultural identity at a time when Ireland is struggling to adjust to the shattering impacts of globalization and religious scandal. They consider a range of literary and filmic works that have sought to articulate this experience, especially the tension between migration and a sense of belonging.

The identity constructs shaped in the nineteenth-century Irish nation-building process were generated by and, in turn, became guarantors of structures of religious, political and cultural authority. This volume examines how these structures have been challenged within literary and cultural discourses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book analyses poetry and prose written by combatant and non-combatant Irish writers during the First World War, focusing on key works influenced by Irish, English and European literary traditions. It highlights the complex positions adopted by writers in relation to the international conflict and to Irish debates about nationhood, which resist reduction to the simple binaries of Unionist/pro-war and Nationalist/anti-war. The book goes on to discuss the literature of the decades following the war, looking at how the conflict was remembered in the two parts of the now divided island, both by individuals and collectively, and investigating the dynamic interrelationship between personal recollection and public memory. In conclusion, the author discusses contemporary literature about the war, which often examines family memory as well as collective memory, and explores its role in the narrative of nationhood, both north and south of the border.

The Amharc Eireann film series was sponsored by Gael Linn, an organization dedicated to the revitalization of the Irish language through modern media and technology. This book, the first full-length investigation of Amharc Eireann, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the complexities of twentieth-century Irish history.

Exploring the works and influence of a wide range of figures including James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Jacques Derrida, J.M. Synge, Helene Cixous, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Hector Berlioz, Maurice Ravel, Neil Jordan and John Field, the essays collected here uncover a wealth of artistic interconnections between France and Ireland.

Bloody Living

Contests and Contexts

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.

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 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.