This original collection of essays explores how literary voices articulate key tensions es within the mainstream tradition of Irish Literature and shows how the works of Lesbian and gay writers are no exception. The essays concentrate on figures such as Oscar Wilde, Somerville and Ross, Eva Gore-Booth, Forrest Reid, Kate O'Brien, Michael Macliammoir, Mary Dorcey and Elizabeth Bowen. Areas such as popular fiction, Gaelic poetry, Irish cinema and theatre are also explored. The book covers an area neglected in Irish Studies but absolutely central to academic and political debate. The contributors include Declan Kiberd, Patricia Coughlan, Anne Fogarty and David Alderson.
This pioneering collection of essays sets out to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual identity and argues that literary expressions of sexual dissidence in Ireland cannot be abstracted from Ireland's experience of colonization.
'Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language?' W. B. YeatsThis anthology traces the history of modern Irish literature from the revolutionary era of the late eighteenth century to the early years of political independence. From Charlotte Brooke and Edmund Burke to Elizabeth Bowen and Louis MacNeice, the anthology shows how, in forging a tradition of theirown, Irish writers have continually challenged and renewed the ways in which Ireland is imagined and defined. The anthology includes a wide-ranging and generous selection of fiction, poetry, and drama. Three plays by W. B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge are printed in their entirety, along with the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. The volume also includes letters, speeches, songs,memoirs, essays, and travel writings, many of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere.'Stephen Regan's anthology vividly and valiantly presents a nation, and a national literature, coming into being.' Paul Muldoon
This book focuses on previously unexplored gaps, limitations and avenues of inquiry within the canon and scholarship of Irish modernism to develop a more attentive and fluid theoretical account of this conceptual field. Foregrounding interfaces between literary, visual, musical, dramatic, cinematic, epistolary and journalistic media, these essays introduce previously peripheral writers, artists and cultural figures to debates about Irish modernism: Hannah Berman, Ethel Colburn Mayne, Mary Devenport O'Neill, Sheila Wingfield, Freda Laughton, Rhoda Coghill, Elizabeth Bowen, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Joseph Plunkett, Liam O'Flaherty, Edward Martyn, Jane Barlow, Seosamh Ó Torna, Jack B. Yeats and Brian O'Nolan all feature here to interrogate the term's implications. Probing Irish modernism's responsiveness to contemporary theory beyond postcolonial and Irish studies, Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities uses diverse paradigms, including weak theory, biopolitics, posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, to rethink Irish modernism's organising themes: the material body, language, mediality, canonicity, war, state violence, prostitution, temporality, death, mourning. Across the volume, cutting-edge work from queer theory and gender studies draws urgent attention to the too-often marginalized importance of women's writing and queer expression to the Irish avant-garde, while critical reappraisals of the coordinates of race and national history compel us to ask not only where and when Irish modernism occurred, but also whose modernism it was?
The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power interprets a wide variety of the most interesting Irish novels of the last ten years of the century from a perspective that focuses on the regulated sexual and constructed gendered body. The demarcating line of identity-the perennial Irish problem-can be gauged at the basic level of sexual and gender identity in contrast to or in alliance with political, social, religious or cultural norms. All mechanisms that have gone into controlling the body-gender regulation, violence, desire, religious taboos-can all be reinterpreted through the body in motion.
This collection of new essays recovers and explores a neglected archive of women's print media and dispels the myth of the interwar decades as a retreat to 'home and duty' for women.
This book surveys Irish writing in English over the last two centuries, from Maria Edgeworth to Seamus Heaney, to give the literary student and the general reader an up-to-date sense of its variety and vitality and to indicate some of the ways in which it has been described and discussed. It begins with a brief outline of Irish history, of Irish writing in Irish and Latin, and of writing in English before 1800. Later chapters consider Irish romanticism, Victorian Ireland, W.B.Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival, new directions in Irish writing after Joyce and the literature of contemporary Ireland, north and south, from 1960 to the present.
Though widely lauded as one of the most creative and challenging forces in Irish theatre Frank McGuinness’s plays have often met with a tempestuous reception. This new work details the significance of key productions of his plays in the context of Ireland’s culture and society. Charting McGuinness’s development as a dramatist from The Factory Girls through to Gates of Gold it combines cultural, political and theatrical analysis to position McGuinness as the most significant Irish playwright of his generation. Textual analysis supports considerations of theatrical performance to show how visual art, stagecraft, sculpture and song are central to our understanding of McGuinness’s theatre. Drawing forth the range of sexual, familial and national identities found in McGuinness’s work this book shows the significance of symbols in theatre that often seeks to confuse the simplicities of absolutes in order to show the complexities of difference. Wide-ranging, theoretically astute and written in a lucid and engaging style, Celebrating Confusion will appeal to all readers who are interested in Irish Theatre and its intersection with the politics and culture of contemporary Ireland.
