For nearly thirty years, Kevin C. Kearns collected the memories and recollections of Dubliners on tape. These interviews have formed the basis of an extraordinary body of work, one whose subjects have included the life of the Dublin pub and the tenement house. In this ambitious book, he considers their contributions in aggregate, drawing on the voices of ordinary Dubliners to build an oral folk history of the city in the twentieth century. Firemen, engine drivers, bell ringers, gatekeepers, cinema ushers, gravediggers, dockers, factory workers, butchers, hatters, booksellers and many more: all contribute their own words to this epic portrait of Dublin city life in the turbulent decades separating the Victorian and modern eras. In Dublin Voices, the words of ordinary Dubliners can be heard as they recall their lives and times. Lucid, witty and compelling, these oral narratives bring the city to life in a manner that conventional histories simply cannot match.
A classroom staple, Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1773-2000 has been updated with writings that reflect trends in immigration to the United States through the turn of the twenty-first century. New chapters include a selection of letters from Irish immigrants fleeing the famine of the 1840s, writings from an immigrant who escaped the civil war in Liberia during the 1980s, and letters that crossed the U.S.-Mexico border during the late 1980s and early '90s. With each addition editor Thomas Dublin has kept to his original goals, which was to show the commonalities of the U.S. immigrant experience across lines of gender, nation of origin, race, and even time.
This pioneering study, first published in 1995, retains its rank as one of the most powerful histories ever written about Irish involvement in World War 1. This year, the centenary of the war, sees its timely re-publication as the Irishmen who fought in that war re-enter the national memory after decades of indifference and hostility. The gradual softening of attitudes over the last twenty years amid great historic change on the island of Ireland, is due in no small part to the efforts of historians, such as Myles Dungan, to tell thousands of forgotten stories. Drawing on the diaries, letters, literary works and oral accounts of soldiers, Myles Dungan tells some of the personal stories of what Irishmen, unionist and nationalist, went through during the Great War and how many of them drew closer together during that horror than at any time since. This volume deals with a selection of the most important battles and campaigns in which the three Irish Divisions participated.
A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts. In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration. The rhythmic, musical, and vivid language of Grennan’s plays incorporates traditional song lyrics, lines of Irish poetry, and letters and speeches of the time. The result is a dramatic collage that tells a story through the voices of characters contemporary to the period of the play’s subject. By presenting subjects through the dramatic rendering of the human voice, the plays facilitate a close, intimate relationship between players and the audience, creating an incredibly powerful connection to the past. Historical moments and literary figures that might seem remote to the present-day reader or audience become immediate and emotionally compelling. One of the plays, Ferry, is drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. It puts unnamed characters who come from the world of twentieth-century Ireland on a boat to the underworld with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On their journey the five strangers, played by two voices, tell stories about their lives, raising the question of how language both captures and transforms lived experience. Addressing the Great Famine, Hunger uses documentary evidence to give audiences a dramatic feel for what has been a silent and traumatic element in Irish history. Noramollyannalivialucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce is a one-woman piece that depicts James Joyce’s wife as an older woman sharing her memories and snippets from the works of her husband. Also included in this rich volume is the author’s adaptation of Synge’s Aran Islands, as well as Emigration Road, History! Reading the Easter Rising, The Muse and Mr. Yeats, The Loves of Lady Gregory, and Peig: An Ordinary Life.
We read because we want to experience lives and emotions beyond our own, to learn, to see with others’ eyes. The 32 is a celebration of working-class voices from the island of Ireland. Edited by award-winning novelist Paul McVeigh, this intimate and illuminating collection features memoir and essays from established and emerging Irish voices including Kevin Barry, Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney, Lyra McKee and many more. Too often, working-class writers find that the hurdles they come up against are higher and harder to leap over than those faced by writers from more affluent backgrounds. As in Common People – an anthology of working-class writers edited by Kit de Waal and the inspiration behind this collection – The 32 sees writers who have made that leap reach back to give a helping hand to those coming up behind. Without these working-class voices, without the vital reflection of real lives or role models for working-class readers and writers, literature will be poorer. We will all be poorer.
Hearing Voices: The History of Psychiatry in Ireland is a monumental work by one of Ireland’s leading psychiatrists, encompassing every psychiatric development from the Middle Ages to the present day, and examining the far-reaching social and political effects of Ireland’s troubled relationship with mental illness. From the “Glen of Lunatics”, said to cure the mentally ill, to the overcrowded asylums of later centuries – with more beds for the mentally ill than any other country in the world – Ireland has a complex, unsettled history in the practice of psychiatry. Kelly’s definitive work examines Ireland’s unique relationship with conceptions of mental ill health throughout the centuries, delving into each medical breakthrough and every misuse of authority – both political and domestic – for those deemed to be mentally ill. Through fascinating archival records, Kelly writes a crisp and accessible history, evaluating everything from individual case histories to the seismic effects of the First World War, and exploring the attitudes that guided treatments, spanning Brehon Law to the emerging emphasis on human rights. Hearing Voices is a marvel that affords incredible insight into Ireland’s social and medical history while providing powerful observations on our current treatment of mental ill health in Ireland.
Since 1998, Open Door has been introducing readers new and old to some of Ireland's finest writers. In this our first collection of stories, we have gathered a range of voices to suit every taste. With themes ranging from family and friendship to ageing, love and childhood, there is something for everyone. So come on in! Book jacket.
A West End theater in London is shaken up by the crimes of Jack the Ripper in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Star of the Sea. Henry Irving is Victorian London’s most celebrated actor and theater impresario. He has introduced groundbreaking ideas to the theater, bringing to the stage performances that are spectacular, shocking, and always entertaining. When Irving decides to open his own London theater with the goal of making it the greatest playhouse on earth, he hires a young Dublin clerk harboring literary ambitions by the name of Bram Stoker to manage it. As Irving’s theater grows in reputation and financial solvency, he lures to his company of mummers the century’s most beloved actress, the dazzlingly talented leading lady Ellen Terry, who nightly casts a spell not only on her audiences but also on Stoker and Irving both. Bram Stoker’s extraordinary experiences at the Lyceum Theatre, his early morning walks on the streets of a London terrorized by a serial killer, his long, tempestuous relationship with Irving, and the closeness he finds with Ellen Terry, inspire him to write Dracula, the most iconic and best-selling supernatural tale ever published. A magnificent portrait both of lamp-lit London and of lives and loves enacted on the stage, Shadowplay’s rich prose, incomparable storytelling, and vivid characters will linger in readers’ hearts and minds for many years. “A vibrantly imaginative narrative of passion, intrigue and literary ambition set in the garish heyday of a theater. . . . Artfully splicing truth with fantasy, O’Connor has a glorious time turning a ramshackle and haunted London playhouse into a primary source for Stoker’s Gothic imaginings.” —Miranda Seymour, The New York Times Book Review “A gorgeously written historical novel about Stoker’s inner life. . . . I wasn’t prepared to be awed by his prose, which is so good you can taste it. . . . O’Connor dazzles.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “And Mr. O’Connor’s main characters—Stoker, Irving and the beloved actress Ellen Terry—are so forcefully brought to life that when, close to tears, you reach this drama’s final page, you will return to the beginning just to remain in their company.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal “This novel blows the dust off its Victorian trappings and brings them to scintillating life.” —Publishers Weekly, PW Picks, Starred Review FINALIST 2019 COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST 2020 DALKEY LITERARY AWARD 2020 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE
In 1916, Eamon de Valera arrived on the Irish scene and as a result, or so we are told, the fairies left. Such combining of fact and folklore is the essence of Peter Somerville-Large's history of 50 years of life in Ireland, from 1916 to 1966.
As a port city, Dublin owes much to the labourers who strove against the heavy-duty tide of imports and exports; a league of thousands who were hired on a day-to-day basis for generations, defining the bustle of Dublin city centre – a cornerstone of the urban industrial working class in Ireland. The Dublin Docker is a sumptuously illustrated history that determines the dockers’ and stevedores’ importance as an industrial subculture within the Dublin that they navigated. The authors excavated the archive of the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society to discover a wealth of photographs, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, that capture the dockers’ arduous labour and the energy of Dublin port. These evocative images bring this beautifully designed social history to life, complementing the inimitable voices revealed in interviews with the dockers themselves. How they negotiated working hours and pay, the changes that came with epochal events – the Dublin Lockout, the First World War, the Easter Rising and War of Independence – and the innumerable myths and ‘dark stories’ that shrouded their image: The Dublin Docker is a history of the dockers and their deep-woven connection to the city.
