Laying Out the Bones
Laying Out the Bones

Author: Bridget English

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2017-12-01

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0815654146

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English sheds new light on death and dying in twentieth- and twenty-first century Irish literature as she examines the ways that Irish wake and funeral rituals shape novelistic discourse. She argues that the treatment of death in Irish novels offers a way of making sense of mortality and provides insight into Ireland’s cultural and historical experience of death. Combining key concepts from narrative theory—such as readers’ competing desires for a story and for closure—with Irish cultural analyses and literary criticism, English performs astute close readings of death in select novels by Joyce, Beckett, Kate O’Brien, John McGahern, and Anne Enright. With each chapter, she demonstrates how novelistic narrative serves as a way of mediating between the physical facts of death and its lasting impact on the living. English suggests that while Catholic conceptions of death have always been challenged by alternative secular value systems, these systems have also struggled to find meaningful alternatives to the consolation offered by religious conceptions of the afterlife.

Back to the Present, Forward to the Past
Back to the Present, Forward to the Past

Author: International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures. Conference

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9789042020382

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The island of Ireland, north and south, has produced a great diversity of writing in both English and Irish for hundreds of years, often using the memories embodied in its competing views of history as a fruitful source of literary inspiration. Placing Irish literature in an international context, these two volumes explore the connection between Irish history and literature, in particular the Rebellion of 1798, in a more comprehensive, diverse and multi-faceted way than has often been the case in the past. The fifty-three authors bring their national and personal viewpoints as well as their critical judgements to bear on Irish literature in these stimulating articles. The contributions also deal with topics such as Gothic literature, ideology, and identity, as well as gender issues, connections with the other arts, regional Irish literature, in particular that of the city of Limerick, translations, the works of Joyce, and comparisons with the literature of other nations. The contributors are all members of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). Back to the Present: Forward to the Past. Irish Writing and History since 1798 will be of interest to both literary scholars and professional historians, but also to the general student of Irish writing and Irish culture.

Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity
Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity

Author: Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 0786456779

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Kate O'Brien's work is now widely considered canonical in the English language, and the author herself an icon for Ireland seeking to reinvent itself. O'Brien's novel Mary Lavelle, banned upon publication in 1936, is a key work of the twentieth century that has suffered from critical neglect despite its wider popularity with readers. This book reexamines Mary Lavelle, exploring its role in the modernist canon and its importance to political and queer activism. The novel's biographical and autobiographical experimentation is of particular note. Through the lens of this crucial novel, the oeuvre of Kate O'Brien is recontextualized and reassessed.

Kate O'Brien and Spanish Literary Culture
Kate O'Brien and Spanish Literary Culture

Author: Jane Davison

Publisher: Syracuse University Press

Published: 2017-10-18

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0815654138

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One of the most important Irish novelists of the twentieth century, Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) was also a pioneer of women’s writing. In a career that spanned almost fifty years, nine novels, nine plays, two travelogues, and copious criticism, O’Brien rebelled against the narrow nationalism and restrictive Catholicism prevalent in independent Ireland. In this highly original approach to O’Brien’s work, Davison traces the influence of three leading Spanish writers—Jacinto Benavente, Miguel de Cervantes, and Teresa of Avila. O’Brien’s lifelong fascination with Spanish literature and culture offered an oblique way of resisting the Catholic and conservative imperatives of the Irish Free State. In a series of close comparative readings, Davison identifies the origin of O’Brien’s creative disinhibition and ultimately situates her within a tradition of dissident Irish women writers.

Irish Women Writers
Irish Women Writers

Author: Ann Owens Weekes

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-10-21

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 081318472X

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From the legendary poet Oisin to modernist masters like James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and Samuel Beckett, Ireland's literary tradition has made its mark on the Western canon. Despite its proud tradition, the student who searches the shelves for works on Irish women's fiction is liabel to feel much as Virginia Woolf did when she searched the British Museum for work on women by women. Critic Nuala O'Faolain, when confronted with this disparity, suggested that "modern Irish literature is dominated by men so brilliant in their misanthropy... [that] the self-respect of Irish women is radically and paradoxically checkmated by respect for an Irish national achievement." While Ann Owen Weekes does not argue with the first part of O'Faolain's assertion, she does with the second. In Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, she suggests that it is the critics rather than the writers who have allowed themselves to be checkmated. Beginning with Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and ending with Jennifer Johnston's The Railway Station (1980), she surveys the best of the Ireland's female literature to show its artistic and historic significance and to demonstrate that it has its own themes and traditions related to, yet separate from, that of male Irish writers. Weekes examines the work of writers like E.OE. Sumerville and Martin Ross (pen names for cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin), Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien, Mary Lavin, and Molly Keane, among others. She teases out the themes that recur in these writers' works, including the link between domestic and political violence and re-visioning of traditional stories, such as Julia O'Faolain's use of the Cuchulain and Diarmuid and Grainne myths to reveal the negation of women's autonomy. In doing so, she demonstrates that the literature of Anglo- and Gaelic-Irish women presents a unified tradition of subjects and techniques, a unity that might become an optimistic model not only for Irish literature but also for Irish people.

Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change
Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change

Author: Gerardine Meaney

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 546

ISBN-13: 1135165637

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This book analyzes the roots of Irish social and sexual conservatism and the dramatic change in one of the most basic areas of human experience: how we understand our roles as men and women. It looks at the relationship between sexual and cultural dissent and the long, slow role of culture in generating change. Meaney offers the first major study that sets the relationship between national and gender identities in the context of analysis of Irish identity as white identity, tracing the identification of female sexuality with foreign threat in nationalist discourse and its consequences in contemporary representations of immigrant women and their children. The study presents an extended analysis of the relationship between feminism and nationalism, and between gender and modernism. Analyzing the role of Joyce in contemporary culture and Yeats and Synge in the understanding of tradition, it also sets their work in the context of their less known female contemporaries and challenges conventional understandings of the Irish literary tradition. The book concludes with an analysis of the relationship between race and masculinity in Irish characters in US and British culture, from Patriot Games to Rescue Me and The Wire, The Romans in Britain to M.I.5

The Letters of John McGahern
The Letters of John McGahern

Author: John McGahern

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2021-08-31

Total Pages: 687

ISBN-13: 0571326676

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I am no good at letters. John McGahern, 1963 John McGahern is consistently hailed as one of the finest Irish writers since James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.This volume collects some of the witty, profound and unfailingly brilliant letters that he exchanged with family, friends and literary luminaries - such as Seamus Heaney, Colm Tóibín and Paul Muldoon - over the course of a well-travelled life. It is one of the major contributions to the study of Irish and British literature of the past thirty years, acting not just as a crucial insight into the life and works of a much-revered writer - but also a history of post-war Irish literature and its close ties to British and American literary life. 'One of the greatest writers of our era.' Hilary Mantel 'McGahern brings us that tonic gift of the best fiction, the sense of truth - the sense of transparency that permits us to see imaginary lives more clearly than we see our own.' John Updike

Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century
Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century

Author: David Pierce

Publisher: Cork University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 1380

ISBN-13: 9781859182086

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With five Nobel Prize-winners, seven Pulitzer Prize-winners and two Booker Prize-winning novelists, modern Irish writing has contributed something special and permanent to our understanding of the twentieth century. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century provides a useful, comprehensive and pleasurable introduction to modern Irish literature in a single volume. Organized chronologically by decade, this anthology provides the reader with a unique sense of the development and richness of Irish writing and of the society it reflected. It embraces all forms of writing, not only the major forms of drama, fiction and verse, but such material as travel writing, personal memoirs, journalism, interviews and radio plays, to offer the reader a complete and wonderfully varied sense of Ireland's contribution our literary heritage. David Pierce has selected major literary figures as well as neglected ones, and includes many writers from the Irish diaspora. The range of material is enormous, and ensures that work that is inaccessible or out of print is now easily available. The book is a delightful compilation, including many well known pieces and captivating "discoveries," which anyone interested in literature will long enjoy browsing and dipping into.